Research Highlights

I. Ninth day of Historical Demography, 8 December 2016 at SHCL

In support of our research programme on ‘Population developments and health in comparative perspective’, SHCL co-organized the 9th Day of Historical Demography, together with FASOS professor Angélique Janssens. The theme was Diseases, causes of death and the epidemiological transition.
Over the past three centuries, mortality and morbidity patterns have been changing all over the world, yet with variations in timing and pace. These changes have been referred to as the epidemiological transition. The main features of the transition include an increase in life expectancy and a shift in the leading causes of morbidity and mortality from infectious and parasitic diseases to non-communicable, chronic, and degenerative diseases. The Ninth Day of Historical Demography aimed at questioning the validity of the epidemiological transition theory in the long run from an interdisciplinary perspective. Papers pertaining to this broad theme were contributed by historians, sociologists, demographers, epidemiologists, and public health specialists.


II. Building the Maastricht Health Transition Database

Research at SHCL is focused on population developments and health in a long term and comparative perspective. In 2016 we started with the building of a digital database of individually registered causes of death in Maastricht between 1865 and 1955, which have been preserved in the collections of the Maastricht Municipal Archives. This data will be combined with data from already digitized death certificates of the Maastricht population. Several FASOS job students are engaged in data entry for this project. The source is quite unique in the Netherlands; only a few municipalities (such as Amsterdam) have kept such records. Once finished, the database will enable research in the so-called epidemiological transition: the transition from death from (mainly) infectious diseases to other causes of death in connection with social, economic and medical developments. Proposals to start comparative PhD-research in this field have been submitted in the COFUND application of Maastricht University. Project-leader is Dr. Willibrord Rutten at SHCL, together with FASOS-Professor in historical demography Angélique Janssens, who started a similar data-entry project in Amsterdam.

Students were involved in the digital input of causes of death of the Maastricht population.