Tulips From Amsterdam

Tulips From Amsterdam

What would you do if you thought you had been scammed? How would you know? Would you tell anybody? Would you wait at the airport for your Nigerian princess to arrive, having sent the money for her fare? Would you happily stand aside and watch on-line as the contents of your bank account are quietly removed to help some of the poor people in India, who are somehow connected with the unexpected lottery win you learnt about last week, and are steadily becoming richer by the minute as the funds are transferred? What if the only people being exploited are gullible novice researchers, tricked into paying extra money to be allowed to present at a little-known conference and have their findings published in a dubious medical journal? What if the harms are ethical and moral rather than financial? Would you go to a scam conference?

          I should have suspected as soon as I paid the registration on-line that the conference in Amsterdam was a fake. The payment was made through a technology company, called the Institute for Sustainable Technology,— ISIT. Is it? Get it?—to a bank account in Dubai. The details to contact them by email didn’t work; I was never able to convince their robot that I was not also a robot. The phone contact was a number in India that rang and rang and was never picked up. A company representative called Nathan sent me a reply to my attempt at registration, in a kind of ungrammatical English that I would not usually expect from a human called Nathan, asking for further details about myself, including asking me to send a copy of my passport, which I refused. At about the same time, I made a booking for accommodation at a hotel in Amsterdam and eventually the air fares. I always do it this way round, pay the conference fee first, then make sure I can get there and stay nearby; I have been caught out previously where the conference is oversubscribed by the time I do the other bookings, or I can’t find a place to stay close to the venue.

          The process provided many clues that something was amiss. “Predatory conferences”, I’ve since learned, have become more common since COVID times, preying on novice academics desperate to get their research noticed and published. Most of them are not really total scams, in the sense of monetary fraud: there is a venue that people can attend, but not many do, the organisers and advertised speakers often don’t turn up, and the academic programme is poorly organised and of dubious value. A Google search using the terms “conference” and “scam” uncovers a vigorous discussion about the phenomenon. The main feature on-line is lists of advice on how to spot if it happening to you. Mine ticked all the boxes. Though like most scams, we prefer to believe they happen only to other people, and our tendency towards confirmation bias leads us to ignore the warning signs.

Signs to look for are an extra fee required for attendees wanting to present their research at the event, to be keynote speakers, to be involved in its organisation, or be submitted for publication in some equally dodgy journal. Another is an overly ambitious title or an unusually broad scientific programme. My conference was called “International Conference on Internal Medicine, Treatment Strategies and Medical Care”. Often the same event is offered in multiple locations. A meeting with exactly the same title as my conference was to be held in Tokyo five months earlier. Typically the website contains errors, as mine did, or is incomplete. A final clue, in my case, was when a Rural Health Conference supposed to be held in Adelaide, which I also planned to attend, used the same bank account as the one in Amsterdam.

Some experienced academics are surprisingly relaxed about the phenomenon, even supportive. One conference organiser felt it is the “way to go”—"real conferences are too much hard work to put together”, he wrote,  “and people always complain.” Some admitted they had attended a fake conference, met with other academics who had been similarly duped, accepted there was little or no programme organised for them, and had a little meeting of their own. Or some who made comments knew of others they worked with who had attended such a conference and said very little about it when they came back. A number of people, it seems, make the most of it and treat it as an opportunity for a work-paid holiday.

I detected an anti-establishment flavour in the comments. Except from the establishment. Most of the advice coming from reputable academic institutions, including universities and main-stream publishers, recommends prospective delegates search for conferences supported by reputable academic institutions. A few academics obviously preferred an independent flavour, and said conferences “have to start somewhere.” One said all the conferences he attends are real; his “work is fake.” Another pointed out the events usually target popular holiday destinations at ideal times of year and if there is any physical meeting taking place, of whatever standard, especially if work is  paying the costs, it might be desirable and justified to take the trip to visit the location. Employers understandably took a different view and some universities regard knowing participation in this dark part of the industry as grounds for dismissal.

My conference was to be held at the Amsterdam Hilton. The hotel is world famous for those who were growing up 1969, and listening to the Beatles, as one of the locations mentioned in “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” John Lennon and his new wife Yoko Ono spent a week in bed there that year to promote world peace—the connection is hard to explain. Suspicious about a conference that ticked all the boxes as fake, offered at the height of the tulip  season at a well-known venue, I emailed the Amsterdam Hilton to ask them if they had a booking. An administrator called Nicola replied, “I regret to inform you we do not host such event in our hotel in the period from you requested”—OK, the grammar was not much better than Nathan’s, but I believed her, and phoned the bank to ask them to dispute the payment. I had to get a new card issued but I got my money back from the registration, and the bank potentially has some more ammunition to use against the scammers in future.

We had a non-refundable booking at a hotel —not the Hilton—in Amsterdam at the height of spring, in the museum quarter, which could no longer be reimbursed by my work. The tulip season in the Netherlands we knew is followed by the bluebell season in England. We had made an additional plan to visit our daughter in London, spend time in England, and come back through Canada. We had paid a deposit on a self-guided walking tour in the English Lake District. We decided to make the trip. I found a course in Cambridge offered by the Royal College of Physicians—one of the world’s most reputable academic institutions, founded by King Henry VIII in 1518, several centuries before the invention of internet scams. I booked to attend that event, fitting in some time in London after our time in Amsterdam, after our walk, and before travelling on the way home to President Donald Trump’s proposed 51st state.

Any trip to Amsterdam starts with a visit to the Van Gogh museum, off the edge of the city. And any trip to the Van Gogh museum starts with a visit to Arles, in the south of France, which is the location and subject of many of his famous paintings. We stayed in the neighbouring city of Nîmes. The region contains plenty to see of interest to visitors. The Roman ruins in this part of France are less ruined than the ones in Rome. Our hotel was next to Nîmes’ older and smaller but better-preserved version of the Coliseum. There is another coliseum, and a well-preserved Roman amphitheatre, in Arles—"friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” I mumbled. We paid to go inside and were treated to a group of gladiators in the centre of the arena fighting playfully entertaining an enthusiastic group of French school children, justifying the price of admission, which we weren’t sure  about before going in.

And it would have been rude while we were in the area not to visit the Pont du Gard, the massive aqueduct that carried water to the city of Nîmes in Roman times, and is now one of the most visited tourist attractions in France outside of Paris. We took a local bus to the aqueduct, followed the crowd to the best viewpoints of the impressive structure, took some photos between showers of rain, had a quick coffee to warm up, and headed back to the bus stop.

A young couple at the bus stop were talking anxiously in a language we didn’t understand—possibly Czech. After our bus arrived, and we had bought our tickets, the two young people came on and tried to talk to the driver. Anglais? the man asked hopefully. The driver shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. Ou allez vous? he asked. The man looked blank. “Where are you going?” I interpreted. The couple told us a long story in English about waiting more than an hour for the bus to Avignon, which hadn’t arrived. I explained this was the bus to Nîmes. They assured me the bus to Avignon also left from this same stop and was supposed to have left half an hour earlier. I started to explain this to the driver but he gave another shrug and interrupted me to say he knew nothing about the bus to Avignon. The couple had already understood this non-verbally, and got off. The bus moved on.

On the way back, for some reason, we took the scenic route through the old village of Castillon. The driver skilfully guided the bus, which now seemed huge, through the narrow streets, dodging ancient stone buildings and late-model Audis. At the last corner, the wing mirror became entangled in an olive tree. The driver muttered some French words we were not taught at school, and got out to assess the damage. He looked directly at me. Levez la branche: “lift the branch,” he instructed. Moi, I checked. This time he nodded. Yes, me. I got out and lifted the branch while he drove the bus. I expected him to reverse, but he drove on forwards, becoming even more tangled in the tree. More French words, further extending my vocabulary. Somehow the driver communicated we would remove the mirror, which we did, he drove on a bit, and we replaced the mirror, which stayed in place, and only the owner would have to worry about .

While we were stopped, there was enough time, at least for the passengers not involved in rescuing the mirror, to look around at the beautiful old village. I tried to imagine it in Van Gogh’s time, when the stone buildings would already have been there, but there would have been fewer cars, no buses, and the olive trees would presumably have been smaller.

Van Gogh we discovered when we got to the museum in Amsterdam, was a country boy at heart, born in the small town of Zundert in the south of the Netherlands. Rural scenes and peasant people were his favourite subjects, though unlike earlier artists like Jean-François Millet, whom he knew and initially copied, and the Romantic poets whom we later encountered in England, he insisted on portraying them as he believed they really were, rather than as some idealised version of themselves. He was technically accomplished and highly educated in his craft. His family were prosperous art dealers, he did drawings as a child, was mentored by an artist relative, studied painting in Paris and met with many of the successful artists of his time.

From an early age, Van Gogh showed signs of mental instability. In 1888 he took refuge in Arles, which we had visited. The yellow house where he lived and painted, and hoped to set up an artists’ colony, was unfortunately bombed by the Allies in World War II and has since been demolished. The hospital to which he was admitted has been preserved as l’Espace Van Gogh and dedicated to his memory. He later moved to another hospital in the nearby town of Saint Remy, which we didn’t visit, where he painted several landscapes depicting that part of Provence, and to an enlightened asylum at Auvers-sur-Oise on the outskirts of Paris where he was encouraged to paint as a kind of therapy.

The speculation about Van Gogh’s medical condition is in some ways more creative than the actual paintings. Some of it centres around a portrait Van Gogh did in 1890 of Doctor Paul Gachet, who looked after the artist during the last months of his life. The painting is in a private collection, and we didn’t see it in Amsterdam, but there is a poor copy, possibly painted by Doctor Gachet himself, in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. In both versions the doctor is holding a purple foxglove, the source of digitalis, which most art historians interpret as a symbol of the subject’s  profession, like the farmer’s pitchfork in Grant Ward’s “American Gothic”, or Pan’s flute. But this doesn’t stop medical experts speculating that the unusual yellow-green tint, employed by the artist for example in “A Starry Night”, is a distortion of perception caused by digitalis toxicity. The medical commentators have no explanation as to how exactly digitalis contributed to Van Gogh’s well-known struggles with mental illness.

We have no record of Van Gogh’s heart disease, if any, or what the supposed overdose of digitalis would have done to his heart rhythms—the electrocardiogram was not invented until 1902 by the Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven. Though some physicians of his time may have been able to tell what was happening by careful examination of his heart sounds. Another Dutchman, Karel Wenckebach, described in 1899 the phenomenon of  progressive lengthening of atrio-ventricular conduction time, which now bears his name, and which some of us struggle to recognise on a well-taken ECG, in 2025.  Wenckebach used only a stethoscope—invented by Frenchman René Laennec in 1816—his ears, and his brain.

 Another candidate for the cause of the unusual visual effects seen in Van Gogh’s paintings is absinthe, which contains a compound called thujone known to cause similar colour distortions. More careful analysis reveals Van Gogh would have needed to drink several gallons a day to produce this effect. He liked the stuff, as did other artists of the day, which is well documented, but not that much. The most toxic compound in absinthe, which paradoxically prevents excessive consumption of the other more interesting alternatives, is alcohol. Other substances in absinthe, or lead-based pigments in the paints the artist would have used, or other toxins and foods, can precipitate porphyria, but there is no good evidence that Van Gogh had symptoms of this rare condition. Medical historians also speculate the visual disturbances were because of glaucoma, or cataracts, or something else. Art historians tend to think he just liked the colour yellow.

Less controversial is the idea that Van Gogh suffered from Bipolar Affective Disorder, joining the long list of creative people—including John Keats, Pyotor Tchaikowsky, and Edgar Allen Poe, posthumously diagnosed as having been affected. Fortunately for modern humans, but unfortunately for Van Gogh and the others, who lived in a less enlightened era, public understanding of the condition and available treatments have both improved in more recent times. A number of modern actors, singers, writers and painters have been labelled as having the condition, suggesting there is a link with creativity.

We didn’t see the famous self-portrait of Van Gogh with his head bandaged after he cut off his left ear during a depressive episode, which is in London, though some of his later works with wild arrangements of colour, which we did see, are supposed to represent the turmoil he experienced. Van Gogh eventually took his own life by somewhat inexpertly shooting himself in the chest and dying two days later.

While in Amsterdam, we also visited the Rijksmuseum, which contains representative paintings of Dutch artists over the centuries, including a few by Van Gogh. The star attraction is “The Night Watch” by Rembrandt van Rijn, which is huge, 42 times the area of the Mona Lisa—which is admittedly very small— and after being slashed with a knife in 1975 and splattered with acid in 1990, is similarly displayed behind protective glass.  I don’t know anything about Rembrandt’s medical conditions, if any; he seems to have been happy and successful in his own life. His most famous medical painting, “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp”, portraying the dissection of a human cadaver, is displayed elsewhere, in the Hague.

Another reason to visit Amsterdam is to take drugs, though absinthe seems to have gone out of fashion. The favourite is alcohol, consumed in great quantities by young English men on stag parties, which the Dutch are doing their best to discourage. And the beer is good. But other drugs are legal and readily available through controlled outlets, which for some reason are called “coffee houses”.

In New Zealand, as a country, we tried and failed in the 2020 election to legalise marijuana. We have retained the concept of police discretion for using drugs, which means: if you are brown and wearing a gang patch you will be charged; if you are white and wearing a suit the police will look the other way. Now it has become illegal to wear a gang patch anyway—but not a suit—which removes the need for the police to establish the use of illegal drugs if they find someone they want to pick on. In the Netherlands, the police have other things to do.

We had a further opportunity, later in our trip, which we also passed on, to consume cannabis if we wanted in Canada, where it has been similarly decriminalised, for the same reasons, relabelled as a health problem, removing some of the control of the drug supply from organised criminals. But it is sold more openly or less euphemistically than in Amsterdam, from “cannabis” shops.

Then there’s the tulips. Did I mention the tulips? They are everywhere in the parks and streets in Amsterdam, and there is always the suspicion there might be some better ones around the corner. To be sure we were seeing the best, we took a bus to Keukenhof, a large landscaped garden created in 1949 at Lisse, a few kilometres out of town, where there are seven million of them—though there seemed to more humans than tulips on the day we visited— along with other spring bulbs and flowers, and a strategically placed windmill. It was worth the trip.

And the conference? I took a walk round to the Amsterdam Hilton, which was close to our hotel, just in case, thinking I might have tricked myself, had overthought it. John Lennon was no longer at the hotel, and nor was anyone from the conference organisation. There was no sign at the venue, there were no sad and lonely academics hanging around outside. There was no conference.