Jean Hissette

Jean Hissette (30 August 1888 – 26 August 1965) was a Belgian ophthalmologist. Hissette was born in Leuven. In 1930, he became the first to discover African River Blindness, a severe eye disease occurring in people affected by onchocerciasis, a filarial worm infection. Onchocerciasis had already been known for a long time, but until 1930 no other specialist in tropical diseases had ever identified severely afflicted blind people anywhere in Africa. Hissette discovered several thousand victims along the Sankuru river in Belgian Congo, and so became the first one to identify this strain of the disease. On 30 August 1888, Philippe Jean Hissette was born in Louvain as the third child of Jeanne Catherine Wouters (1855–1936) and the mining engineer, Louis Hissette (1858–1888). Four months before the birth his father had died at the age of 30. Philippe Jean had two brothers, Louis-Ferdinand (1885–1972) and Jean-Baptiste (1886–1887). After her husband, Louis Hissette, had died, Jeanne Catherine remarried to Joseph Pieraerts in 1892. Jean, as he was called visited Schools in Louvain and in Melle, Ghent. From 1908 until 1909 he was recruited for the military service. After that he began to study medicine in Louvain. When the First World War broke out in 1914 Jean Hissette was still a medicine student and had spent his July vacations in Lacuisine. On 1 August 1914, mobilization day, he left Lacuisine for the duration of the war. During the First World War and after the war had ended, Jean performed four years of military service as a medically adorned sanitary officer in the medical service unit of the 1st division of the Belgian Army. He was mainly deployed in the front line against the Germans at the Yser. In 1919 he passed his state examination at the University of Ghent. Later the same year he married the anversoise Hilda de Vriendt (old Flemish painter family) and at this point he settled as a private doctor and obstetrician in the independent practice in Florenville-sur-Semois en Gaume, Rue d’Orval Nr.7.