Developing a historical disease database of the Netherlands based on newspapers

Kristina Thompson, Wageningen University & Research
Qixiang Fang, Utrecht University
Erik-Jan van Kesteren, Utrecht University

The nineteenth and early twentieth century Netherlands had a very high burden of infectious diseases. To study health and living standards in this period, capturing the disease burden is critical. While today we are able to measure the disease burden with infection rates, this is generally not possible for the past. This inhibits researchers from, for instance, studying how exposure to infectious diseases in early life might impact someone’s health later on in life. Contemporaneous sources may help us to better-proxy the disease environment. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dutch newspapers reported on the number of new cases and deaths from specific infectious diseases. A large share of these newspapers are digitized and publicly available via the Royal Library of the Netherlands’ Delpher.nl. In this study, we converted these newspaper mentions into a quantitative indicator of the disease burden. We processed newspaper mentions of a disease, connected them to a geographical region, mapped them onto numeric scales, and assess their performance as a proxy of the disease burden in a given municipality and year. The result is an open-source disease database and historical map.

Keywords: Digital and computational demography, Historical Demography, Population, Shocks and Pandemics, Health and Morbidity

See extended abstract.