The library of the Royal Tropical Institute (Koninkliijk Instituut voor de Tropen - KIT) in Amsterdam counts more than 300 - mainly published - titles about leprosy. The KIT library holds a large historical collection of books, brochures and periodicals about the Dutch East and West Indies (Indonesia, Surinam and Netherlands Antilles). The catalogue can be accessed at http://www.kit.nl. The archives of the Royal Tropical Institute are also part of the KIT library.

According to the the Royal Tropical Institute, the institute (or KIT) "is an independent centre of knowledge and expertise in the areas of international and intercultural cooperation, operating at the interface between theory and practice and between policy and implementation. KIT was founded in 1910 as the 'Colonial Institute' to study the tropics and to promote trade and industry in the (at that time) colonial territories of the Netherlands." For leprosy researchers, the two main divisions are of big importance. The division of "health and development" contains a biomedical research unit in which researchers for example are doing research on world wide leprosy prevention. The division of "culture" includes the tropenmuseum and the (anthropological and medical-historical) collection that has been gathered from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards. It contains many pictures of former leprosaria in the Dutch colonial empire, like Bethesda in Suriname and Donorejo in Indonesia. A selection of them can be found online in the database at http://collectie.tropenmuseum.nl

Entry made December 20, 2006