Henk Visser speaking at the 10th Anniversary ESPE Meeting in 1971 in Zürich, From left to right, front row: Milo Zachmann (Zürich), Henk Visser (Rotterdam), Dieter Knorr (Munich); second row: Henning Andersen (Copenhagen), Walter Svoboda (Vienna), Andrea Prader (Zürich). Third row, far right: Jean-Claude Job (Paris).
Henk Visser speaking at the 10th Anniversary ESPE Meeting in 1971 in Zürich, From left to right, front row: Milo Zachmann (Zürich), Henk Visser (Rotterdam), Dieter Knorr (Munich); second row: Henning Andersen (Copenhagen), Walter Svoboda (Vienna), Andrea Prader (Zürich). Third row, far right: Jean-Claude Job (Paris).
March 26, 2023
Born 19th June 1930 in Dokkum (Friesland), Henk received his medical training at the University of Groningen medical school 1948-1955; pediatrics 1956-1960. In 1958, he defended his thesis entitled: “Investigations on the postnatal synthesis of foetal haemoglobin” (cum laude). In 1960-61, he spent a year in the United States as he was awarded a United States Public Health postdoctoral Research Fellowship for study with Dr John F. Crigler in the Department of Pediatrics, Children’s Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. As John Crigler trained with Lawson Wilkins who had written the very first textbook on pediatric endocrinology in 1950 and who in the USA is considered the godfather of pediatric endocrinology, Henk liked to say that he was a ‘grandson’ of Lawson Wilkins.
In 1964, Henk was the first to suggest a defect of the terminal aldosterone biosynthesis in patients with hypoaldosteronism based on carefully documented observations of two newborns with failure to thrive and severe salt-loss. Many years later in 1996, the disorder was confirmed in the original patients by gene mutation analysis.
Henk was very proud to have been appointed as the first lector in paediatric endocrinology in The Netherlands in 1967, but already that same year he was called to Rotterdam to be the first Professor of Paediatrics at the newly erected Erasmus University and to head the department of Pediatrics and transform the Sophia Children’s Hospital into an academic paediatric hospital.
Henk played an instrumental role in the early development of ESPE from a small club of just 28 European friends to the current global scientific society with meetings attended by thousands of participants.
He was gifted with a meticulous sense of documenting facts and events. He was the first combined secretary and treasurer from 1965-1971 and we owe him many details about the organization of meetings, programs and speakers in the early days. The first meeting of the “Paediatric Endocrinology Club” took place in Zürich in 1962 and the second was organized by Henk in Groningen in 1963, attended by 31 participants from nine different European countries.
Henk drafted the constitution for the society which was adopted in 1965 and the name of the newly established association was to be the “European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology”. He also started negotiations with pharmaceutical companies on financing a research fellowship and suggested running various laboratory workshops.
In 1976, Henk hosted the 15th Annual meeting in Rotterdam with over 500 participants, jointly with the European Society for Paediatric Research and the Working Group for Mineral Metabolism.
Social events were a very important part of an ESPE meeting and an extensive social program always included a concert and the third day of the conference was devoted entirely to an excursion. Margreet, Henk’s wife and prop and stay for life, greatly stimulated these initiatives. He attended many Annual ESPE meetings, the last being the 50th Annual meeting in Glasgow in 2011; he was elected honorary member in 2002 during the Annual meeting in Segovia, Spain.
Whereas over the years his accomplishments as head of a large Paediatric department as well as dean of the Medical Faculty of Erasmus University Medical Center covered many aspects of paediatrics and paediatric patient care, nutrition, public health, ethics, organization and curricula of medical schools, he often claimed to be in principle just a paediatric endocrinologist.
His many students, residents and fellows will thankfully remember him as a visionary advocate of science and evidence-based medicine in paediatrics, being of service and compassionate with the ill child and its parents.