Uncovering the Unknown Patient. Exploring 19th-Century Patient Registers from Dutch Hospitals

This article explores the use of 19th-century patient registers for historical research, focusing on a case study of several hospitals in the Netherlands. These patient registers offer a unique combination of extensive personal data (e.g., name, age, sex, occupation, marital status, religion) and medical and clinical information (e.g., diagnosis, length of hospitalization, and treatment outcomes). Although these sources hold immense potential, they remain significantly underexplored. This article situates these registers within their historical context and evaluates their availability, structure, reliability, strengths and limitations. Building on experience with constructing and utilizing patient register databases for hospitals in Amsterdam, Groningen and Middelburg, the article explores both the challenges and opportunities involved in digitizing and analyzing data from patient registers. This article shows how these records can be used to broaden our understanding of institutional healthcare, patient demographics, health inequalities, disease patterns, and life courses. By doing so, it aims to demonstrate the value of these underexplored sources for advancing the study of the history of health, medicine and patient care.