Gunnar Holmgren (1875-1954).

Abstract

GUNNAR HOLMGREN was born in Uppsala on Sept 27, 1875. He grew up in one of that period's most liberal homes, and was the son of a professor of physiology, Frithjof Holmgren— well known from the time of Scandinavianism—and his equally distinguished wife, Ann Margret Holmgren, one of Sweden's pioneer feminists. During his early student years, Gunnar Holmgren came into close contact with social and political problems which subsequently were to be fundamental for many of his initiatives. After completing his medical studies[ill] partly in Uppsala and partly at the Caroline Institute in Stockholm, he received his doctorate of medicine in 1909 with a dissertation on the purulent diseases of the inner ear. This was an outstanding work on one of the most dreaded and fatal complications of middle ear inflammation at that time and, in fact, until the era of chemotherapeutics. During his first years after qualifying as a