A legend leaves (but not quite, we hope): Nib Soehendra

 

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Nib Soehendra

Both authors confess that this is not an objective scientific piece of work; on the contrary, it is a heavily biased article with all possible violations of conflicts of interest (which we obviously enjoy), because the authors (one of whom is the successor of the subject of interest) have to admit, that the person under discussion has been a very good friend for a number of years, and has been enormously influential in the areas where we were deeply involved.

Nib Soehendra left his clinical position of Chief of Endoscopy at Hamburg University in the fall of this year; nonetheless hopefully he will still be around in the future to help and guide us with teaching and developing GI endoscopy to meet its further demands and challenges.

His influence on GI endoscopy has been enormous. Gastrointestinal endoscopy has seen a very limited number of pioneers of his class in Europe, the previous editors of this journal, Meinhard Classen and Ludwig Demling, being other outstanding examples. In contrast to them, however, Nib Soehendra is a surgeon – and people might have feared that this would split endoscopy. Due to Nib’s unique personality, it never did, and he set a glorious example of interdisciplinary cooperation between gastroenterology and surgery (and we are convinced other disciplines such as interventional radiology and gastrointestinal oncology will follow).

Nib Soehendra started his career as a medical student when he moved from Jakarta to Hamburg at the age of 19, and found himself thereafter as assistant to the surgeon Hans Schreiber, whom he followed when Schreiber took over the Chair of Surgery at Hamburg University. Nib, a surgeon by origin, was determined to play a part the newly emerging area of endoscopy, and with the tasks he had to fulfil and the challenges he started to become aware of, he and others discovered that this would be the prevailing topic of his lifetime. Nib Soehendra’s innovations in the areas of biliary endotherapy, variceal injection, and many others, have made him famous and us richer. His list of publications is as long as it is spectacular, and he has served as co-editor-in-chief of this journal for many years, as we remember with pleasure and gratitude.

Nib has also been a great teacher, and you could meet him around the world at almost every major endoscopic meeting. Out of any four endoscopists that you might meet in every country we can possibly think of, five know Nib Soehendra. His international community of pupils and fans, reaching from South America to the Far East, is enormous. Everybody who watched Nib, either directly in his endoscopy room (always packed full with national and international guests) or via satellite transmission – from EndoClub to live demonstrations abroad – sensed his enormous teaching ability, which included both technical mastery and responsibility for the patient he was treating. Despite all his admirable capabilities and achievements, Nib has always been a very modest and approachable personality, loved by his team and his friends worldwide.

We do not need to stress again how grateful we and the endoscopic community are to Nib Soehendra for all he has done for us and our patients, and we wish him all the best we can think of for his future. We promise that we will work very hard to continue his tradition and keep him on board in academic interdisciplinary endoscopy, to help us with his unsurpassable energy, experience, and wisdom.

J. Izbicki, T. RöschDepartments of Surgery and Interdisciplinary Endoscopy, University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany