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Treatment of tuberculosis or TB in the Netherlands in the 1950's. Film 31236

863 views · Published 31 January 2013 · 8:40 · Indexed 14 October 2026

Channel: HuntleyFilmArchives · 2013 · News & Politics

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Amsterdam in the 1950's.  The story of the Dutch diamond trade and tuberculosis of the workforce in the 1950's.
A general view of Amsterdam, Netherlands, Europe, showing a large church or Cathedral by a wide canal.  A street scene shows plant and flower stalls with a street vendor examining produce.  Boats and barges are shown travelling on a canal while the narration comments on Amsterdam's importance as a port.  A scene on a bridge over a canal shows a busker watched by three bystanders.  These men are smoking, while they watch the street performer, who plays a guitar and a harmonica.  We see the outside of a factory, while an open truck passes on the road.  The narration sets Amsterdam as the greatest centre of the world's diamond industry.
Inside a factory a row of men sit at a long equipment filled work bench, inspecting diamonds.  A close up of a worker shows him examining a large cut diamond with an eye-glass.  He then displays it between his thumb and first finger and makes it sparkle.  Long benches of equipment are shown in a light and spacious room.  Two workers stand at these.  A young man works at a grinding or polishing machine, which is then shown in close-up.  A woman worker uses a grinding machine. The soundtrack comments on the poor working conditions in the industry fifty years before, and mentions the prevalence of tuberculosis or TB amongst diamond workers.  
An old man uses tools at a bench.  A row of workers sit at a bench of equipment in front of large windows.  The narration tells us that the film is about the fight against T.B. undertaken by Jan van Zutphen, who became secretary of the diamond workers union just after the turn of the twentieth century.  He is pictured in a factory shaking the hand of a worker at the time of the film's making, aged 89. He wears a suit, is bald, with a long white beard and has small round tortoise-shell spectacles. He walks behind a row of polishers watching them practice their trades. A close-up of a polisher at work shows the process of mixing polishing oil, and setting up a polishing wheel. A man sitting in a laboratory , wearing a white coat uses a microscope. He examines the contents of a test tube, and then shakes its contents into a small glass jar.  In the factory a man scrapes black grease from the guard around a polishing wheel. The narration tells us that this by-product was granted to the workers' T.B. fund, once Zutphen instigated research which established that it contained diamond traces and could be profitably re-cycled. In a laboratory, a man wearing overalls, goggles and thick black rubber gloves stirs a shallow pan which boils and produces steam in a fume cupboard, as part of the process of extracting the diamond from the grease.  A man using scales weighs diamond dust into small paper packages.  An invoice book is written in by a hand holding a fountain pen, illustrating the sale of the diamond dust.
Two women and two men walk across open shrub land towards Zonnestraal, a modern white hospital building for Tuberculosis sufferers, built with union money from many trades. A view of a two storey wing of the hospital, with shrubs in the foreground and trees surrounding it, shows patients standing on balconies and laying on beds on outside terraces under canopies, being tended by uniformed nurses.  Inside the hospital a young man in a white coat sits at a desk and examines a bank of X-rays. In a white tiled room in the sanatorium, a patient sits on a hospital bed attended by a man and woman both in white coats.  The doctor treats his patient with a piece of modern equipment which stands beside the bed, which is then seen in close-up.  A view of the specialist's face shows him watching the patient and the equipment.  A patient is shown lying in a reclining chair linked up to a some form of respiration equipment.  A graphical reading device linked to the apparatus is shown in close up.  On the hospital terraces a man sits upright in a white metal framed bed, while a nurse in uniform brings him food on a tray and then arranges his bedclothes.  
A view of the hospital grounds shows a number of overalled men wandering through the trees towards new arc-roofed workshop huts, described as 'light and airy'.  The narration tells us that these are for rehabilitation training for the recovering patients.  Inside a workshop a man is shown in overalls working a fret-saw. A middle-aged patient, overseen by a young man in a white coat, is shown learning a new trade on a punching machine which is intended to put less strain on his weakened constitution than his old work within a heavy industry.

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