And then all hell broke loose

What did people die of in the second half of the nineteenth century? Anyone who knows that people lived and survived in crowded houses, damp cellars and dirty streets in Amsterdam at that time will already have an idea. Mayra Murkens and Owen Lammertink delved into this past. It yielded fascinating stories. These can now be read in the book ‘And then hell broke loose’ that was published earlier this month.

Historian Owen Lammertink discovered a unique source: the Causes of Death Register in the Amsterdam City Archives. The data that the project produces are available to everyone and can be used for research into epidemics, for example. Mayra Murkens from the Faculty of Arts was involved in the project.

Fascinating and tragic

Did poor city dwellers die earlier than the wealthy in the nineteenth century? And from which diseases and ailments? Both researchers answer these and more questions using fascinating and tragic stories of ordinary city dwellers, such as servants, diamond cutters, sex workers, nurses, doctors and a silversmith.

A large part of the Amsterdam population lived in miserable conditions around the middle of the nineteenth century. Working-class neighborhoods were packed, houses were poorly ventilated, there was great poverty, resulting in food
shortages, and there were hardly any sewers or water pipes.

Cholera in Amsterdam

The book gives all this misery a face. For example, in the person of the thirty-two-year-old Johannes Roelofs, whose life changed drastically in a short time in July 1866. Within a few days he had to bury his wife and two of his children. . They had all fallen victims to the cholera epidemic, which reportedly reached the capital via the port on 27 April. That year, no fewer than 1,098 residents of Amsterdam died from this highly contagious disease.

With And then the pleuris from Meulenhoff published a book that sketches a
fascinating history of living conditions in the big city of the past.