Cornelia Jacoba Elisabeth Backer (Physician)
A Young Woman Facing Mortality with
Knowledge: The Life and Symbolism Behind the Ex Libris of C.J.E. Backer
In the interior of three well‑used psychiatric textbooks lies a story far larger than the volumes themselves: the story of Cornelia Jacoba Elisabeth Backer, born in 1907 in the Dutch East Indies, who would become one of the early generations of academically trained female physicians in the Netherlands. Her presence appears in the form of a striking ex libris, dated February 1926, pasted neatly onto the endpapers of her books; a visual manifesto of a young woman preparing to enter a profession still dominated by men.
A Pioneer in a Changing Medical
Landscape
Backer studied medicine at the University
of Amsterdam, completing her medical degree in 1933. At that time, female
physicians were still rare; the first Dutch woman to qualify as a doctor had
done so only a few decades earlier. Backer belonged to the first wave of women
who entered medicine not as exceptions, but as determined participants in a
profession undergoing transformation.
After graduation she established herself as a physician in Heemstede, one of the few women in the region with a medical practice. Later she became a school doctor in The Hague, where she appears in professional listings and medical publications well into the 1960s and 1970s under her married name, C.J.E. Lietaert Peerbolte‑Backer. Her career reflects the trajectory of many early female doctors: moving from general practice into public health, pediatrics, and school medicine; fields where women were often welcomed earlier than in hospital specialties.
The ex libris she adopted in 1926 is
remarkable not only for its artistic force but for the clarity with which it
announces who she intended to become. It shows a young, nude female figure
standing upright and unafraid, gripping a scythe in one hand while lifting a
bone triumphantly in the other, her body poised above a defeated skeleton at
her feet. Nothing about the image is passive. It reads as a declaration, a
visual argument crafted at the very moment she was preparing to enter the
medical world. In this emblem, death is not an inevitable force but an
adversary she is learning to confront and, crucially, to hold at a distance
through knowledge, discipline, and skill. For a young woman in the 1920s,
stepping into a profession still shaped by male authority, the choice of such
an image becomes almost autobiographical: a symbolic self‑portrait of someone who understood that medicine offered her both
power and purpose, and who saw herself not as a bystander to suffering but as
an active agent pushing back against it.
A Woman Facing Mortality — and Refusing
to Yield
In the 1920s, medical students often chose
ex libris designs that reflected their intellectual ambitions. But for a young
woman in medicine, the choice of such a bold, almost defiant image was unusual.
The figure in the print is not threatened by death; she dominates it. She
stands upright, strong, unashamed, and victorious. The scythe, traditionally
the weapon of Death, is now in her hands. The bone she lifts is not a symbol of
mortality but of mastery.
This is the language of medical
empowerment.
It is the visual equivalent of saying:
“I will keep death at a distance — through
knowledge, discipline, and skill.”
For a woman entering a profession that had
long excluded her, the symbolism is doubly powerful. It is an assertion of
competence, agency, and intellectual authority.
The ex libris appears in a complete set of
G. Jelgersma’s Leerboek der Psychiatrie - the standard psychiatric textbook of
its time. The volumes contain pencil annotations, underlinings, and marginal
notes, showing that Backer did not merely own these books; she worked with
them. The marks reveal a student absorbing complex material, a young doctor
shaping her understanding of the human mind, and later a school physician
applying psychiatric insight to the realities of child health.
These books, together with the ex libris, form a rare surviving fragment of the intellectual life of an early female doctor, a life usually invisible in archives and public records.
Cornelia Jacoba Elisabeth Backer (1907, Nederlands‑Indië – 1999†) and Dr. Maarten Lietaert Peerbolte (1905–1982) almost certainly met while working together at the Christelijk Sanatorium voor Zenuwlijders in Zeist, where the 1935 Nederlandse Staatsalmanak lists him as arts and her as assistent‑arts, a rare professional pairing of two young physicians in the same psychiatric institution. Their engagement, recorded in contemporary newspapers, was followed by marriage in the mid‑1930s, after which she appears consistently under her married name C.J.E. Lietaert Peerbolte‑Backer. The couple settled in The Hague, where she served as a school doctor and he developed his unconventional career as psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and author in prenatal psychodynamics, parapsychology, and transpersonal psychology. Their family grew with the births of their daughters Ella, Ellen, and Machteld Lietaert Peerbolte in 1936, 1942 and 1944, all announced in the burgerlijke stand; birth columns of the Dutch press. After Maarten’s death in 1982, noted in NRC Handelsblad, Cornelia continued to appear in mid‑century medical and civic records, though her own death notice has not yet surfaced in indexed digital sources.
A Life Reconstructed Through Traces
Backer’s story is not preserved in memoirs
or biographies. Instead, it survives in:
her ex libris,
her marginalia,
her medical listings,
and the books she studied and used.
Through these fragments, we see a woman who
carved out a place for herself in a profession that was only beginning to open
its doors to women. Her ex libris is not merely decorative; it is a declaration
of intent, a symbolic self‑portrait of a
young woman who chose to confront death not with resignation, but with
knowledge.
It is, in essence, the emblem of a pioneer.
Text Sources:
Biographical records of early Dutch
female physicians
University of Amsterdam medical
graduation registers (1930s)
Historical listings of school doctors in
The Hague
Medical publications mentioning C.J.E.
Lietaert Peerbolte‑Backer
Contextual studies on ex libris
symbolism in the early 20th century
