State’s Medical Experts in Local Practice: Provincial Doctors View of Themselves as Public Health Promoters: an Example from the Swedish Countryside, 1880–1920

Abstract

This case study focus upon Swedish provincial doctors as practitioners in a sparsely populated medical district in Sweden 1881-1920, and their positions as state’s medical experts in a period when the first steps towards a welfare state were taken. The question to be answered is how the doctors themselves looked upon their possibilities to promote public health in the Swedish countryside? The study shows that the provincial doctors for sure identified themselves as representatives of the Swedish state, medical science and modernisation, and that they agreed upon their own importance in the crusade of bringing modern welfare to the Swedish countryside. In practice, though, their possibilities to implementation and influence seem to have been limited – something that the doctors were well aware of. The explanation is probably lack of confidence, as a result of the doctors’ tendency to distance themselves from the simple, ignorant and reactionary locals.