Sari Aalto
is a historian and has the title of Docent in the History of Science and Ideas at the University of Helsinki. She has been working as a project researcher at the University of Eastern Finland in 2020−24 in the research project “Changing Attitudes towards Medical Uncertainty in the Training of Physicians from the 1880s: Finland in a Transnational Perspective”, funded by the Research Council of Finland. Previously, Aalto has studied the history of university and basic education, medical education and medical profession as well as university student culture in Finland. Among other books, she has published the history of the Finnish green movement and green party, Vaihtoehtopuolue. Vihreän liikkeen tie puolueeksi (Helsinki: Into 2018). Aalto is currently working as executive director of the Finnish Historical Society and in the research project of the history of Akava (Confederation of Unions for Professional and Managerial Staff in Finland).
Rolf Ahlzén
is a Swedish practising physician with a background also in history and philosophy. Parallel to his clinical work, he has written and taught in the area of medical humanities and is now working as an associate professor at the hospital of Örebro. He has particularly written on the connections between literature and medicine.
Niels De Nutte
holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). He is a programme coordinator and researcher at Odisee University College and a guest professor at VUB, affiliated to the SSAB research group. He has published on the history of organised secular humanism and non-religion, as well as on the history of end-of-life practices in Belgium in the twentieth century, co-editing Looking Back to Look Forward. Organised Humanism in the World (Brussels: ASP 2019) and The Non-Religious and the State. Seculars Crafting Their Lives in Different Frameworks from the Age of Revolution to the Current Day (Berlin: De Gruyter 2024). He is an associate editor of Secular Studies (Brill) and an associate director of the International Society for Historians on Atheism, Secularism and Humanism.
Pieter Dhondt
is Senior Lecturer in General History and Head of the Department of Geographical and Historical Studies at the University of Eastern Finland. He
Jolien Gijbels
is an Assistant Professor of History at the SHOC research group of the Free University of Brussels (VUB). Her research is situated in the field of the history of medicine and science, with particular attention to gender, surgery, and reproductive medicine. Her current research concerns the development of gynaecological surgery and doctor-patient relationships in the twentieth century.
Rachel Irwin
is a researcher in ethnology in the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University. Her research uses ethnographic methods to research health policy at global (i.e. WHO), European and national levels. Her most recent research project is on the history of Sweden’s approach to global health and development cooperation. She has also researched fertility care in Europe and Sweden.
Anne Katrine Kleberg Hansen
holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Copenhagen (KU) on perceptions of fatness in Western European medicine (2014). Immediately after, she took up a short-term position as postdoctoral research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute für Wissenshaftsgeshichte. She has since researched the history of medicine with a particular focus on issues of fatness and paediatrics in different settings, e.g. as part of the collaborative Governing Obesity, funded by the KU Excellence Programme for Interdisciplinary Research, and as an individual postdoc granted by the Carlsberg Foundation, during which she was a research associate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. She currently works as senior research consultant at The Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design and Conservation. Her
Saara-Maija Kontturi
is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, currently working as a project researcher in the project “Medical Electricity, Embodied Experiences, and Knowledge Construction in Europe and the Atlantic World, c. 1740−1840”. Her earlier research has focused on medical history from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, especially the history of physicians and their professionalisation. From 2020 to 2023, she has been employed as a project researcher in the project “Changing Attitudes towards Medical Uncertainty in the Training of Physicians from the 1880s: Finland in a Transnational Perspective”. In this project she studied medical uncertainty in the context of professional authority, the religious aspects of medical practice, and the development of medical theories.
Virginia Langum
is professor of English literature at Umeå University in Sweden and editor of the Nordic Journal of English Studies. She is interested in all facets of medicine, literature, culture and health. Her previous work, including her book Medicine and the Seven Deadly Sins in late Medieval Literature and Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2016), focussed on the relationship between medicine and religion in understanding human behaviour, thought, and experience in the Middle Ages. She is currently working on questions related to travel, geographical displacement, and health in the nineteenth century.
Måns Lindén
is affiliated to the Department of the History of Medicine and to the Department of Clinical Sciences Helsingborg, both being part of the medical faculty of Lund University, Sweden. This chapter is based on his modified, and previously unpublished master thesis, which was awarded the Sandblom Scholarship, in memory of Philip and Grace Sandblom, in 2022.
Suvi Rytty
is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku, specialising in the history of medicine and health, with a particular interest in the history of alternative medicine. In 2021, she received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Turku, Finland. In her dissertation she examined the practice of
Petr Svobodný
is director of the Institute for the History and Archive of Charles University in Prague. In his research he deals with the history of universities and history of medicine and health, in particular with the history of faculties of medicine and hospitals in the nineteenth and twentieth century. He published several monographs on these topics, including the comprehensive History of medicine in the Czech Lands (2004; 2022) and History of Charles University (1995−1998, 4 volumes). He is also a senior lecturer in the history of medicine in the Institute for the History of Medicine and Foreign Languages, 1st Faculty of Medicine of Charles University.
Evelina Wilson
is a grant-funded doctoral researcher at the Åbo Akademi University. Her research focusses on the cultural aspects of medical history during the long nineteenth century. In her doctoral dissertation she studies how perceptions of illness and health contributed to shaping the lifestyle of the social elite in Finland and Sweden, ca. 1790−1900. Her research is patient-oriented, and in her dissertation she includes both men and women from childhood to old age. She has also studied topics within the history of emotions. Her article “Bittra tårar och gudomlig förtröstan. Uttryck för sorg och tröst i svenskspråkiga ståndspersoners brev i Finland 1808−1852” was published in Historiska och litteraturhistoriska studier 96 (2021).
Jonatan Wistrand
is a medical historian and general practice (G.P.) registrar. Since 2023, he is head of the Department of Medical History at the medical faculty of Lund University, Sweden. Jonatan Wistrand is also affiliated to the Birgit Rausing Centre for Medical Humanities, developing and implementing interdisciplinary education and research within the fields of Medical Humanities at Lund University. His doctoral dissertation from 2019 – Doctors as Patients. Documentary and Literary Narratives from the 20th and 21st centuries – charted and interpreted pathographies written by doctors afflicted with personal illness.