Nederlandsch-Indische Artsen School

Before the foundation of NIAS in 1913, in the nineteenth century, there was a type of training in the Dutch East Indies called Dokter Djawa, a form of rudimentary medical certification for Javanese people who were not permitted to attend European schools.

That Dokter Jawa School, founded in 1851, began as a few rooms in the military hospital in Batavia; teaching was in Malay until around 1875, and after that in Dutch.

[1] In 1902, a more rigorous Dutch-medium medical program was launched in Batavia called the School for Training of Native Doctors STOVIA.

The training it offered at first was very basic, as resources and teachers were in short supply during the First World War, and no student actually graduated until the early 1920s.

Students from the program were transferred to Jakarta and enrolled in a new Japanese-run medical school called Ika Daigaku.