In memory of Bèr Eggen
19 November 1953 – 8 November 2016
Member of the Medical History staff, Metamedica department
It was with great sadness that we learned of the unexpected passing of our colleague Bèr Eggen on Tuesday 8 November. In the past six months, Bèr had started to gradually resume the work he had been forced to abandon for an extended time due to failing eyesight. In spite of his deteriorating vision, it was with great optimism and enthusiasm that he took up the search for suitable activities that we could develop with him in the medical history field, particularly in the nearby region. Thus, in recent months he made substantial contributions to the preparation of the upcoming medical history exhibition at MUMC.
Bèr joined the Medical History staff in 2009, working in the Metamedica department. From the outset, he was incredibly motivated to educate a wide audience about the history of illness, health, and medicine in his beloved Limburg. He was a gifted storyteller, describing in animated detail where the leper house of Maastricht or that of Aachen must once have stood. In his view of knowledge and scholarship, Bèr was almost the quintessential social democrat, and it was one of his great regrets in life that as a youth he had not had the opportunity to go on to university. Though he was a Maître des Beaux-arts and a good draughtsman and painter, he dreamed of pursuing academic work, too. It was with this ambition that he began his hunt through the 17th and 18th-century student registers of the universities and 'illustrious schools' of France, Germany, modern-day Belgium and the old Dutch Republic in search of natives of Maastricht and the surrounding region. Over time, this runaway chauvinistic hobby crystallised into a scholarly inquiry into how and where students from what was then still a region of divided political loyalties went to pursue their studies. Bèr was an expert in the history of the region and of the city of Maastricht in particular. In spite of his limited eyesight, he continued to make a point of trying to see as much as there still was to see of the history of this part of the country.
Sadly, Bèr will never have the chance to complete his historical research into the medical doctors of Maastricht, or to attend the opening of the exhibition in which he was so closely involved. We will miss Bèr deeply.
We wish Annelies, their children and the rest of the family the strength to bear this great loss.
On behalf of the Metamedica department at Maastricht University,
Dr Eddy Houwaart, professor of Medical History