Van Raemdonck graduated from the University of Ghent in 1845 as a doctor of medicine and the following year as a doctor of midwifery. After working for a while as an intern at the Hôpital de Gand, Van Raemdonck started working as a doctor for the poor ("Médecin des pauvres") for the Charity Office of Sint-Niklaas. He remained in this post for about thirty years. Meanwhile, his personal interest was in the history, prehistory and folklore of his region. In 1861 Van Raemdonck was one of the founding members of the Royal Archaeological Circle of the Land of Waas. He contributed a large number of objects to the collection of the Kring museum in Sint-Niklaas - such as flints, fossils, urns and Roman coins - some of which came from his own archaeological excavations. He also conducted research into the figure of the geographer Gerard Mercator. Typical of the general orientation of his research, Van Raemdonck devoted several articles to the question of Mercator's nationality, whom he regarded as Rupelmond, Flemish and Belgian. This caused Van Raemdonck to enter into a fierce conflict with German historians who regarded the famous cartographer as a German. After Van Raemdonck's recuperation of Mercator as a Belgian, busts of the famous cartographer were erected here and there in Flanders, including in the Académie royale de Belgique. This placed his work in the ideological and politically charged historiography of the end of the nineteenth century, which, among other things, probed for a Flemish cultural identity. Van Raemdonck also collected a large number of objects related to Mercator for the association museum, such as maps and publications.[1] In 1871, Van Raemdonck was appointed honorary member of the Royal Archaeological Circle of the Land of Waas.
Van Raemdonck was also a member of the Académie d'Archéologie de Belgique (1883) of the Société royale belge de Géographie (1877) and a corresponding member of the Cercle archéologique de Mons (1888), the Société royale des beaux-arts et de littérature de Gand (1875) and a number of foreign scientific societies such as the Dutch Geographical Society of Amsterdam (1883) and the Société des anciens textes russes of Saint Petersburg (1880).
Born and raised in Sint-Niklaas, Dr. Jan-Hubert Van Raemdonck (1817-1899) was one of the founders of the Royal Archaeological Circle of the Land van Waas in 1861. He was the first curator of the city museum and the founder of the Mercator collection. He was also a doctor for the poor.
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