Introduction

Physicians often tend to be seen as holding the top position in the hierarchy of health practitioners. In prior research, they often come across as aloof, high-status figures, who in the eighteenth-century paired up with the state to regulate, oversee, and improve the activities of all other health practitioners. This chapter argues that Swedish physicians’ connection to the state remained tenuous throughout the eighteenth century. I contend that physicians were not particularly important to the state, except as one of many groups of actors on a medical market. They were, to put it bluntly, neither considered nor treated as an important part of the machine of governance. That is not to say that they were completely unimportant, but neither were hatters, cobblers, or indeed barber-surgeons or midwives inconsequential. This, of course, is a position that runs contrary to earlier historiography, which has tended to portray eighteenth-century physicians, and in particular their main organisation the Collegium Medicum, as forerunners to nineteenth- and twentieth-century branches of the state that are concerned with social medicine, hygiene, and general improvement of the health of the population. By giving examples of how physicians negotiated with other groups and operated in different roles on the Swedish medical market and in relation to the state, this chapter instead points to the sprawling complexity and open-ended nature of early modern health practices. To create a more complex, and hopefully also more truthful, description of the role of physicians in eighteenth-century Swedish society, I take as my point of departure two propositions, which underlie the argument of the present chapter.