| 1. |
- Berg, Annika, 1973-
(author)
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Den gränslösa hälsan : Signe och Axel Höjer, folkhälsan och expertisen
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation investigates the mutual life project of Signe (1896-1988) and Axel Höjer (1890-1974), a married couple who were key actors in the construction of the Swedish welfare state. It emphasises the ways in which they went about asserting a special public health expertise in different contexts. As starting points I take the malleability of the concept folkhälsa (people’s health or population health) and the centrality of expertise in the governance of modern societies. Theoretical concepts such as gender, policy transfer, biopower and governmentality are central to the analysis. The dissertation includes three parts. The first part investigates how the Höjers agreed to coordinate their work and how they, with reference to ideas picked up in France and England at the end of World War I, attempted to reform mother and child health care in Sweden. Their strategies where rhetorical but also practical, using Hagalund outside Stockholm as their experimental ground. The second part investigates, firstly, how Axel Höjer, as General-Director of the Medical Board of Sweden (1935-52) asserted a sociomedical expertise, integrating the emerging social sciences and universalist views on the organisation of the welfare state into the realm of medicine, in order to launch ideas of a thorough reorganisation and expansion of the Swedish health care system. His focus was on preventive medicine and health care, with the complete physical, mental and social health of the whole population as an explicit goal. Secondly, it explores how Signe Höjer at the same time tried to launch ideas on health and wellbeing as a social politician and a public committee member. She also tried to define family policy as a specific policy area. However, despite her training as a nurse and a social worker, she was largely confined to asserting a particularly ”female” expertise, which made her position rather ambiguous in terms of authority. The third part investigates how the Höjers, in the 1950s and 60s, worked with international health, Axel mainly for the WHO in India and Ghana, Signe as a policy entrepreneur, primarily in the fields of childcare and family planning. My findings partly confirm theories that see development aid as an extension of domestic social policy, but they challenge the view of aid as a simple one-way process. I demonstrate how the Höjers at least tried to adapt their projects abroad to meet local circumstances, and also show how they brought lessons from the third world to a domestic public. In the latter case they did not primarily act as experts of Swedish-style social policy, but as experts on the developing countries and on development aid.
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| 2. |
- Björk, Maria, 1978-
(author)
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Problemet utan namn? : Neuroser, stress och kön i Sverige från 1950 till 1980
- 2011
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Focusing on Sweden between 1950 and 1980, this doctoral dissertation analyzes and problematizes the process in which a discourse about neurosis and nervous troubles gradually evolved into a discourse about stress. The thesis aims to show how the medical and general discussion about diffuse or vague symptoms transformed and rearticulated ideas and views on society and man, citizenship, gender roles, and medicine. It shows how the discourse on neuroses tended to locate sickness and deviance in the individual, whereas its subsequent transformation into a discourse on stress located the pathological in an external, societal sphere.A particularly prominent issue in the study concerns the role that gender, and in particular female gender, has played in these discourses, and how the place of the feminine can be understood in relation to stress and neuroses. The dissertation shows that female gender was not central to the discourse on neuroses and stress during the studied period. On the contrary, gender was subordinated to ideas about man and citizenship within the greater context of society and culture.The dissertation takes its starting point in the Swedish 1950’s, often characterized as the era of ”The Strong Society” or ”The People’s Home”. During this period, the neurosis discourse was fixed and remained unchanged. In practice, neurosis was a diagnosis that provided such symptoms that were otherwise difficult to measure and assess with a theory of origin. Neuroses were believed to principally affect a certain category of individuals, who, due to their constitution or disposition, were held to be particularly susceptible to neurotic sufferings.During the 1960s the belief in The Strong Society and its notion of ideal citizenship began to crumble. It was against this background that the Swedish medical profession started discussing ”stress”. Stress, in contrast, could afflict anyone and everyone, according to “the father of stress” Hans Selye and Swedish stress researchers. Stress was assumed to be a potential cause of ”nervous troubles” and disease, but was never considered to be a disease in itself. The concept of the individual as a citizen now gave way for the notion of the individual as a primarily biological organism. Within the stress discourse in the 1960s, the primacy of the universal normal (male) man was a recurring focal point.In the 1970s, the stress researchers distanced themselves from Selyes’ concept of stress by focusing on individual factors. In the discussion about stress during the 1970s, the ”constitutionally weak” individual of the 1950s and the biological organism of the 1960s blended into a hybrid construction of a unique, biological individual.
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| 3. |
- Cornu, Armel, 1994-
(author)
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Enlightening Water : Science, market & regulation of mineral waters in eighteenth-century France
- 2022
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- My thesis investigates the process through which French mineral waters were conceptually and materially transformed by the forces of market, regulation, and science during the Enlightenment. Tracing this process deepens current understandings of eighteenth-century societies, and presents a novel image of the development of medicine and chemistry.Eighteenth-century mineral waters were no longer confined to discrete spa towns. Instead, their use had become a kingdom-wide phenomenon, thanks to developments in bottling. Increased access to mineral waters caught the interest of medical and chemical practitioners who wanted to explain the striking properties of the waters and ensure they were sold fairly and safely. This culminated in the 1776 creation of a dedicated regulatory institution, the Société de Médecine, which attempted to legislate the market of mineral waters.By examining the extensive records of the Société, my work brings into focus the unsuspected reach of the mineral water market, and explores the history of the institutions that attempted to control it. In parallel, I highlight the active resistance to the centralising force of the state coming from the vast, eclectic and inherently decentred world of mineral water handlers. Mineral water knowledge, likewise, was created within a decentred network of analysts, who nevertheless produced an increasingly standardised method for the chemical examination of mineral waters. Access to this intricate process of knowledge creation is provided by hundreds of treatises, reports, and letters concerning the analysis of mineral waters produced and circulated throughout the French kingdom. This substantial array of hitherto understudied primary material, interpreted via a combination of quantitative methods and social history from below, makes a case for mineral waters as a lens to both illustrate and challenge established narratives of the period. My work thus demonstrates the significance of the Enlightenment period in the longer history of spas and healing waters.
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| 4. |
- Dahlkvist, Tobias
(author)
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Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Pessimism : Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Leopardi
- 2007
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation is a study of the predominantly German pessimistic tradition in the philosophy of the late nineteenth century, and of Nietzsche’s complex relation to that tradition. The aim of the dissertation is firstly to analyse how pessimism came to be established as a philosophical concept by Schopenhauer and a later generation of pessimistic thinkers, and secondly to investigate how Nietzsche understood pessimism.In the first part of the dissertation, I argue that although the term pessimism was coined in 1759, and although it was used in a philosophical context by Schopenhauer in the 1840’s, it was not until Eugen Dühring and Eduard von Hartmann defined it in terms of the value of life in the late 1860’s that a clear conceptual content was attributed to pessimism. After Dühring and Hartmann, philosophical pessimism was generally understood as the notion that the value of life is negative, which means that non-existence is necessarily preferable to existence. This notion of pessimism was shared, I demonstrate, by their contemporaries, regardless of whether they considered pessimism a metaphysical truth or a mental illness.In the second part of the dissertation I argue that pessimism became a problem for Nietzsche when he read Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten in 1869. He was, however, no pessimist: I argue that he in Die Geburt der Tragödie and the Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen sought to develop a philosophy of art that can help us overcome the pessimistic truth that non-existence is preferable to existence.In the third part of the dissertation I demonstrate that a number of important themes in Nietzsche’s later phase are rooted in his early reception of philosophical pessimism. I argue that his discussions of nihilism, of the poetry and character of Giacomo Leopardi, of Hamlet, and of the eternal recurrence are best understood in relation to pessimism.
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| 5. |
- Drakman, Annelie, 1981-
(author)
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När kroppen slöt sig och blev fast : Varför åderlåtning, miasmateori och klimatmedicin övergavs vid 1800-talets mitt
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- For 2500 years, bloodletting, purging, climate medicine and the miasmatic theory were the fundaments of Western medicine. But then, over the course of just a few decades during the middle of the nineteenth century, they disappeared. Silently, without having been disproven or even disputed, before the breakthrough of bacteriology.In this study I investigate the reasons behind this abandonment, which has been described as ”a precondition for scientific medicine”, using 8800 yearly reports written by 2500 Swedish provincial doctors between 1820 and 1900. These were state funded doctors, based in mostly rural districts throughout all of Sweden. Their tasks included overseeing midwives and vaccinators, inspecting pharmacies, managing epidemics, establishing their own practice and reporting back to the National Board of Health. Their digitised reports constitute a unique source of materials giving direct insight into their conceptions of health and disease.The reports provide evidence that the collapse of ”traditional” medicine should be understood as the result of a decisive break between two different ways of understanding the interaction between body and environment: ”flow-managing” and ”boundary-protecting” medicine. Until the 1860s, the provincial doctors aimed to manage the volume and pace of flows of body fluids. However, between 1865 and 1900, they instead focused on upholding the boundaries between the body and its environment. Doctors stopped understanding bodies as open, fluid, and constantly interacting with the world around them, and rather began perceiving them as closed off, autonomous from and independent of their environment. This shift in what it meant to practice medicine explains the covert but momentous demise of ”traditional” theories and therapies.
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| 6. |
- Haffenden, Chris
(author)
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Every Man His Own Monument : Self-Monumentalizing in Romantic Britain
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- From framing private homes as museums, to sitting for life masks and appointing biographers, new forms of self-monumentalizing emerged in the early nineteenth century. In this study I investigate the emergence and configuration of such practices in Romantic Britain. Positioning these practices at the intersection of emergent national pantheons, a modern conception of history, and a newly-formed celebrity culture, I argue that this period witnessed the birth of distinctively modern ways for the individual to make immortality. Faced with a visceral fear of being forgotten, public figures began borrowing from celebrity culture to make their own monuments.Concentrated upon early nineteenth-century London, I characterize these practices as attempts at self-made immortality. I do so by analyzing the legacy projects of three well-known but seldom connected individuals: the Auto-Icon by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the Soane Museum by the architect Sir John Soane (1753–1837), and the life-writing efforts of the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846). Employing both sociological and materialist frameworks to analyze the making of immortality, I contend that these projects were characteristic of a novel regime for the production of lasting renown. Whereas earlier scholarship on Romantic recognition has tended to focus either on mass-media celebrity or the longer history of canon-formation, I highlight the interactions of celebrity and monument embodied in entrepreneurial efforts to secure future recognition.In Every Man His Own Monument, I demonstrate how a constellation of media forms and recording practices we now take for granted—the statuary figure, the house museum, and the published Life—assumed a central place within a new memorial regime. Bringing the historical roots of self-monumentalizing individuals to light, this study contributes to discussions both within the History of Celebrity and Cultural Memory Studies, and to broader debates regarding our Instagram-saturated present.
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| 7. |
- Hellström, Petter, 1980-
(author)
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Trees of Knowledge : Science and the Shape of Genealogy
- 2019
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This study investigates early employments of family trees in the modern sciences, in order to historicise their iconic status and now established uses, notably in evolutionary biology and linguistics. Moving beyond disciplinary accounts to consider the wider cultural background, it examines how early uses within the sciences transformed family trees as a format of visual representation, as well as the meanings invested in them.Historical writing about trees in the modern sciences is heavily tilted towards evolutionary biology, especially the iconic diagrams associated with Darwinism. Trees of Knowledge shifts the focus to France in the wake of the Revolution, when family trees were first put to use in a number of disparate academic fields. Through three case studies drawn from across the disciplines, it investigates the simultaneous appearance of trees in natural history, language studies, and music theory. Augustin Augier’s tree of plant families, Félix Gallet’s family tree of dead and living languages, and Henri Montan Berton’s family tree of chords served diverse ends, yet all exploited the familiar shape of genealogy.While outlining how genealogical trees once constituted a more general resource in scholarly knowledge production—employed primarily as pedagogical tools—this study argues that family trees entered the modern sciences independently of the evolutionary theories they were later made to illustrate. The trees from post-revolutionary France occasionally charted development over time, yet more often they served to visualise organic hierarchy and perfect order. In bringing this neglected history to light, Trees of Knowledge provides not only a rich account of the rise of tree thinking in the modern sciences, but also a pragmatic methodology for approaching the dynamic interplay of metaphor, visual representation, and knowledge production in the history of science.
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| 8. |
- Helmius, Agneta, 1960-
(author)
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Mode och hushåll : Om formandet av kön och media i frihetstidens svenska små- och veckoskrifter
- 2022
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis, Fashion and the household: The formation of media and gender in 18th Century Swedish periodicals and pamphlets, deals with the formation of media and gender in 18th Century Sweden using fashion and the household as themes of discussion and gender as an analytical category. The material used consists of periodicals, small prints and series of pamphlets published from the 1730s to the 1770s in Sweden, and one engraving showing five housewives beating a husband on his bare buttocks printed in 1755. According to both writers of that time and to earlier research these periodicals and pamphlets, printed in small editions and circulated mostly in the capital of Stockholm, meant a breakthrough for a new public discourse. One aim is to study how gender was used, discussed and constructed in this new media. Another aim is to study how gender was used to create modern forward looking identities. Of particular interest in this new media is the debate on modernity and how it brought about new views on modern society including both gender relations and the construction of public and private spheres. The public discourse fostered a debate on the privatization of the household.The perspective chosen is meant to show how gender was used differently, on different levels by both male and female writers depending on purpose or agenda and sometimes in opposition to the described changes taking place. Gender could be used both benevolently and with hostility.By using gender as analytical category the public discourse studied in this thesis is decoded showing how both society and the public discourse, simultaneously, were gendered in new ways. It presents a debate of modernity on the threshold to modernity, and a debate on the exploitation of private vices and the privatization or marginalization of the household, later to be described as a division of private and public spheres.
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| 9. |
- Ingemarsdotter, Jenny, 1975-
(author)
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Ramism, Rhetoric and Reform : An Intellectual Biography of Johan Skytte (1577–1645)
- 2011
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis is an intellectual biography of the Swedish statesman Johan Skytte (1577–1645), focusing on his educational ideals and his contributions to educational reform in the early Swedish Age of Greatness. Although born a commoner, Skytte rose to be one of the most powerful men in Sweden in the first half of the seventeenth century, serving three generations of regents. As a royal preceptor and subsequently a university chancellor, Skytte appears as an early educational politician at a time when the Swedish Vasa dynasty initiated a number of far-reaching reforms, including the revival of Sweden’s only university at the time (in Uppsala). The contextual approach of the thesis shows how Skytte’s educational reform agenda was shaped by nationally motivated arguments as well as by a Late Renaissance humanist heritage, celebrating education as the foundation of all prosperous civilizations.Utilizing a largely unexplored source material written mostly in Latin, the thesis analyzes how Skytte’s educational arguments were formed already at the University of Marburg in the 1590s, where he learned to embrace the utility-orientated ideals of the French humanist Petrus Ramus (1515–1572). Moreover, the analysis shows that the expanding Swedish state administration in the early seventeenth century was in urgent need of educated civil servants, and that this basic demand favored an ideology based on education, skill and merit. It is shown that Skytte skillfully combined a Ramist and patriotic rhetoric with narratives of individual merit and rewards, conveying not least himself as an example. The thesis argues that Skytte’s rhetoric reflects the formation of a new professional category in the Swedish society, one that was distinguished from the royal courtier, the clergyman, the merchant, the warrior, and the scholar. This category is the professional civil servant whose identity was dependent on skills and education.
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| 10. |
- Jansson, Martin, 1988-
(author)
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Samtidens gränser : Om språkreformer och historisk tid runt sekelskiftet 1900
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation examines two extensive language reforms that caused controversy and discord in late 19th century Sweden: a comprehensive spelling reform and a formally authorised Bible translation. Among the numerous disagreements and entanglements that afflicted the projects, one issue persisted more than any other: the question of historical time. The correlation between past, present and future was fiercely contested and became a topic of intense negotiation.The purpose of this thesis is to analyse situated constructions of historical time around the turn of the 20th century. By invoking the language reforms as examples of temporal synchronisations, the study contributes to recent debates about modern temporalities and historical time. While earlier research predominantly considers intellectual discourses and abstract notions of temporality, this study emphasises historical time as a consequence of practical measures and applied procedures.The study concludes that historical time was established in order to manage a plethora of conflicting temporalities and asynchronous rhythms. The spelling reform and the Bible translation were affected by a wide range of conflicting times that preceded the notions of progress and acceleration often associated with the modern regime of historicity. The thesis demonstrates how the language reforms established a modern historical order that is often reduced to a passive articulation of an underlying regime.
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