Nord Medicinhist Arsb. 1995;125-48.
Nordisk medicinhistorisk arsbok
[Article in Swedish] R Qvarsell
PMID: 11624759
In a rather complicated process starting at the middle of the 19th century and ending hundred years later social medicine was established as a science. Different theories on the social origin of the diseases and even different perspectives on the role of medicine in society did influence and shape the new discipline. The tradition from Rudolf Virchow and Alfred Grotjahn emphasizing the importance of the social causes of the diseases and the tradition from social hygiene with its stress on the hereditarian background of many diseases was mixed together in the early history of social medicine. Many of those trying to establish the new discipline thought that it could be used in order to prevent the spreading of diseases in society and also hinder the development of social maladjustments of different kinds, as for instance criminality and vagrancy. The political framework of social medicine was very much related to what in the Swedish debate later on was to be called social engineering. Both within the tradition of social liberalism and the social democratic party the ideals of a rational society governed by experts was very influential in the period between the two world wars. Some of the advocates for social medicine did even try to formulate a political programme with the new science as a base. The most influential of those was the forensic pspychiatrist Olof Kinberg (1873-1960). In a series of books and articles during the first half of the 19th century Kinberg developed a theory of a society governed by doctors educated within this new branch of science. He thought that almost every kind of social problem could be handled by these experts. Social maladjustment, criminality and even car accidents could be reduced to a minimum if only the new knowledge of the biological and medical causes of human behavior was allowed to influence the social and political organization of the society. Especially during the 1930s some politicians and also social scientists thought that politics in the future had to be some kind of applied science. In order to govern a complicated society it was necessary to use the knowledge developed within the sciences dealing with the relation between man and society. After the second world war this way of thinking was a little bit obsolete, but it did influence many of those working within the public sphere as administrators and experts.
