A lecture at Hope College will focus on illness in the early days of Holland.
Dr. Jan Peter Verhave will present the address "The Realm of Ghosts: Sickness and Death in the Early Holland Colony" on Thursday, Nov. 9, at 3:30 p.m. in the Fried-Hemenway Auditorium of the Martha Miller Center for Global Communication.
The public is invited. Admission is free.
Verhave is the first Netherland-America Foundation (NAF) Visiting Research Fellow at the Van Raalte Institute of Hope College. While at the institute, Verhave is doing research on the state of health of the early Dutch immigrants and their vulnerability to certain diseases, as derived from reports on their physical well-being in letters to family and friends in the Netherlands. He arrived in September and will be in Holland until early December.
Verhave is a microbiologist at the Radboud University Medical Centre of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He has a Ph.D. in medical sciences and is an authority on the history of malaria and tropical diseases, with many publications on the topic. He is actively engaged in the history of medicine and leads the history section of the Netherlands Society of Tropical Medicine and International Health. In addition, he is interested in religious and social matters of the 19th-century Netherlands and has published a book and significant articles on church history.
Verhave's fellowship is supported by an award received from the Netherland-America Foundation in March 2006. Through the grant, the Van Raalte Institute hopes to strengthen international understanding and collaboration by bringing Dutch scholars to the institute annually.
The Van Raalte Institute, located in the Theil Research Center at 9 E. 10th St., specializes in scholarly research and writing on immigration and the contributions of the Dutch and their descendants in the United States, but is also dedicated to the study of the history of all the people who have comprised the community of Holland throughout its history.
The Martha Miller Center for Global Communication is located on Columbia Avenue at 10th Street. Refreshments will be served in the building's rotunda immediately prior to the lecture.