Antonius Mathijsen

Antonius Mathijsen (1805 to 1878) was a Dutch army surgeon who first used plaster of Paris to hold broken bones still in a plaster cast. Born in Budel, the son of a village physician, he trained in hospitals at Maastricht and Brussels and at the army medical school in Utrecht and was commissioned in the Royal Netherlands Army in 1828. While working at the military hospital in Haarlem in 1851 he watched workmen mend church plaster with strips of jute dipped in plaster of Paris and reasoned that a bandage made the same way would set in minutes, where the older Belgian starch method took a day. After testing the idea on chickens he published it in 1852, and a research panel praised its worth for the army in 1853. He retired in 1868 as a lieutenant colonel and died in Hamont, and monuments stand in Budel and Hamont.