Willem Thomas de Vogel

[4] Leaving for the East Indies two days after graduating,[1] he worked as a local physician at the sugar plantations in Tegal on Java from 1893 to November 1895, overseeing early smallpox vaccination efforts there.

[1] He learned ophthalmology working under Herman Snellen in Utrecht in late 1896 and won a grant from the Donders Memorial Fund the next year which allowed him to study under Theodor Leber at Heidelberg and Ernst Fuchs at Vienna, Austria.

[1] Marrying Suzanna Catherina Bierman (29 August 1877 – 25 January 1954) on 14 September 1897,[6] he returned to the East Indies in July of the next year and began a practice in Semarang,[2] whose lower town constantly suffered from dysentery, typhoid, cholera, and malaria.

[8] De Vogel took charge of the local insane asylum in 1899, became the chief state physician for the city in 1901, and performed important research in the transmission of malaria through mosquitoes over the next decade,[7] aside from a year and a half he was forced to take off for medical reasons.

[10] H. Thomas Karsten's eventual plan for the area omitted any space for low-income housing (kampongs) and instead filled it with spacious roads and expansive villas, creating the district that now comprises Semarang's Candisari neighborhood (Nieuw Tjandi).

[9] During this time, he established the colony's quarantine ordinances,[15] investigated the conditions of Indonesian pilgrims on their way to Kamaran and Mecca during the annual Hajj,[9] was active in limiting an outbreak of bubonic plague in Malang,[7] and began reforming and organizing the East Indies' Department of Public Health (Dienst der Volksgezondheid).

[14] De Vogel was tasked with travelling to Paris to serve as the Dutch East Indies' representative to the League of Nations' International Office of Public Hygiene in late 1925, a temporary post that became permanent enough that he retired from his other roles effective 1 January 1927.