Start of PhD-project ‘Escaping bad health and early death. Inequalities and time lags in the Maastricht health transition, 1864-1955’

Starting in 2018 a PhD-project will be housed at SHCL on the subject of: ‘Escaping bad health and early death. Inequalities and time lags in the Maastricht health transition, 1864-1955’. The PhD is financed through matching by FASoS and SHCL. Supervisors are Professor Angelique Janssens (FASoS) and Dr Willibrord Rutten (SHCL).

The PhD will investigate the so-called epidemiological transition on a micro level: the transition from death from (mainly) infectious diseases to other causes of death. His/her research will be based on the ‘Maastricht Health Transition Database, 1864-1955’ encompassing the causes of death of more than 76,000 individuals dying in Maastricht from the 1860s until the 1950s. The database was built with the help of several FASoS-students employed by SHCL.

This database enables the reconstruction in detail of the social differentiation, the individual background and the cause of death of all individuals who died in the city during this period. As a result it will be possible to map and reconstruct the spatiotemporal history of death and disease in the city as these evolved over those 100 years.

Poster with information on the Maastricht Health Transition database