Dutch PhD. surgeon and art collector.
He was the son of the the professor of mathematics and physics David Bierens de Haan (3 May 1822, Amsterdam – 12 August 1895, Santpoort) and Johanna Catharina Justine IJssel de Schepper (13 April 1827, Deventer – 25 January 1906, Haarlem). They got nine children, but at least four daughters died early.
He followed the Gymnasium and from 1887 till 26 October 1894 medicine in Leiden. He travelled to Bonn, Wien, Paris and London to visit hospitals. On 16 December 1896 he graduated cum laude with the thesis “Over de stofwisseling bij levercirrhose” (About the metabolism of liver cirrhosis). Then he specialised in surgery under professor Samuel Siegmund Rosenstein (20 February 1832, Berlin – 31 January 1906, Den Haag).
In 1899 he went to South Africa to serve the Dutch Red Cross as an ambulance-doctor in the Boer War. In 1901 returned to Leiden, where he continued his training as a surgeon under J.E. van Iterson en J.A. Korteweg. In 1902 he joined the board of Dutch Red Cross, a position he held until 1915. In 1905 he became a surgeon in the Eudokia Hospital in Rotterdam. During the Balkan War, he went to Greece as the leader of a Red Cross ambulance group (1912-13). During the First World War, he was between end 1915 to early 1917 the head of the Dutch hospital in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Later he visited Russia, North America, Syria, Persia, Afghanistan, and British-Dutch-Indies, Far East, China and Japan.
He never married, but travelled a lot for his Red Cross work and to collect prints. After his career Bierens de Haan devoted himself entirely to his collection of prints. It included Dutch masters, but also James Ensor, J. Whistler, K. Kollwitz and P. Picasso. After his death, he left his huge collection of 26,000 prints and his library to Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam.
He was an erudite and well-read man, with a broad interests in all fields of science.
He died 8 December 1951 in Amsterdam.
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