Swedish in Name Only: The International Education of Nineteenth—Century Swedish Medical Students and Practitioners

Abstract

Travelling abroad to learn about the latest innovations has long history but the importance and mechanisms of these cultural and professional interactions has recently become of growing interest among historians of medicine. Scandinavia is often perceived as being largely peripheral to the events and ideas found on the continent or in Britain and this paper is an attempt to illuminate the degree to which Swedish physicians were part of the medical world of the nineteenth century. Their numerous applications to travel and the published accounts of their adventures certainly throw into question the notion that particular national forms of medical practice and specific innovations waited patiently for permission to cross national borders. Instead, medical students and physicians were actively engaged in the 'Europeanization' of medicine built upon multiple personal and professional connections throughout the continent. In 2005, Ute Frevert defined Europeanness as a web of communication and interaction ... [that] displays different degrees and patterns of involvement, shifting centers and margins, uneven and asymmetric relations, and competitive, often violent encounters, and proposed that various professional networks contributed to the dissemination of knowledge.1By arguing that centres and margins are not fixed in time and space, Frevert's definition also addresses one of the major short-comings with core-periphery models that envision single, hegemonic and largely permanent core and similarly fixed but much weaker periphery. The alleged subservience of the latter on the former is often attributed to the temporal lag between the discovery of innovations and their wider reception and adoption which in turn is dictated by how easily information is able to move between these areas. Timo Myllyntaus suggests six 'channels' by which technology flows from industrial cores to more peripheral areas.2 During the nineteenth century at least three of these same 'channels' existed for the transmission of medical innovations from the continent to Sweden. First, the Swedish government had long history of financing educational trips abroad for its physicians and students so that they could study at foreign universities, visit medical institutions, or attend international conferences. Second, the teaching of medicine within Sweden improved and attracted more and more students at the same time that professional organisations arose with their own journals to foster the exchange of ideas. Third, and perhaps most important was the willingness to accept and import medical knowledge from various European locations regardless of their level of international acclaim. The combination of these forces plus improvements in transportation that enabled individuals to flit from place to place much more easily than in the past, minimised the temporal lag between discovery and implementation. At the same time, the mixing of students and physicians from numerous countries significantly reduced the cultural distance between them. The shrinking of physical and cultural distances, process that quickened during the course of the nineteenth century, makes the utility of thinking in terms and cores increasingly suspect. A clear example of how far supposedly peripheral Sweden had come by the mid-1870s can be seen in the international acclaim Uppsala University received when it celebrated its quatercentenary in 1877. Representatives from thirteen different countries and forty-eight different universities, academies and societies arrived to participate in the festivities and were uniformly impressed with what they saw.3There has been long tradition in Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia of borrowing ideas and technology from abroad so it should not be surprising that medical innovations would similarly find their way into the Swedish cities and countryside.4 Some historians have pointed to Sweden's high literacy rate and the importance the population placed on education, the country's 'human capital', as key reasons for its rapid industrialisation during the late nineteenth century that enabled it to compete with the economic powerhouses of Britain and Germany. …