One of the most original voices in British post-revolutionary philosophy belongs to the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713). Rather than supporting the Hobbesian and Lockean idea of modern political society as an artificially formed creation, Shaftesbury perceives society as a beneficial outcome of nature and natural rationality. Shaftesbury’s understanding of natural society is furthermore entwined with aesthetic matters. The aim of the following article is twofold. First, due to the fact that Shaftesbury’s ideas rarely are analysed in any detail by Swedish scholars, it offers an introduction to Shaftesbury’s take on the complex relation between society and poetry to readers of eighteenth-century intellectual history in general, and readers of the history of literature in particular. Second, given that Shaftesbury is frequently regarded as the first modern advocate of aesthetic autonomy, I wish to problematize such an account by showing how Shaftesbury opposes the idea that poetry holds an instrumental value for society, while he simultaneously maintains the inseparability of poetical truth, artistic whole, and political naturalism. As this article shows, the Promethean myth of creativity is central for Shaftesbury’s understanding of the relation between society and poetry.
Sublime place, subaltern space: Railroad workers and female cooks on the subarctic railroad 1898–1902
The purpose of this article is to articulate the lived experience of the workers who built the Subarctic Railroad 1898–1902. The article explores how worker’s experi- ences relate to conventional histories of the industrialization of the Swedish far north, arguing that said industrialization was not only capitalist, but also colonial. In particular, it examines ideas and practices related to the spatial conditions along the railroad, and the social practices, aesthetic values and nationalist mythologies those conditions inspired. In order to express a counter-narrative to patriarchal-colonial representations of history and to discover previously excluded subject positions, rail- road worker’s accounts have been analyzed through a theoretical and methodological framework informed by feminist postcolonial theory with a focus on space and materiality. The article finds that colonial tropes are frequent in texts produced by elites, but rare in railroad worker’s accounts. Instead, the latter are characterized by the violence that colonial and capitalist practices have in common. For female work- ers, the ambivalence of rural colonial space enabled a certain degree of boundary transgression, yet at the cost of abjection.
This article uses the yearly reports written by Swedish provincial doctors between 1840 and 1900 to discern these doctors’ view of their main patient group, the peasantry. It shows that the doctors habitually portrayed the rural population as fatalistic and ignorant. This description appears dubious, however, in the light that the peasantry was said to be ignorant due to their practice of hiring quacks to treat disease, and fatalistic since they did not care to treat disease at all. On accounts that a fatalistic population hardly could support extensive quackery, this portrayal of the peasantry is partly understood as a strategy with beneficial effects for the provincial doctor. Four different functions have been discerned. If the peasantry was seen as ignorant and fatalistic, any resistance towards unpopular interventions enforced by the provincial doctor, such as forbidding large funerals for those who died in contagious diseases, could be disregarded. All difficulties the provincial doctor had with establishing the trust of his patients could be understood as struggles against ignorance rather than personal failures. The demands the provincial doctor would make to his superiors in his yearly report for increased funds would seem reasonable in the light of his daunting tasks. And in contrast to the peasantry, the doctor could present himself as a rational and active figure, struggling against difficult conditions in order to bring health and cleanliness to the countryside.
The international non-conformist denomination, Seventh-day Adventists (SDA), have since their foundation in North America in 1863, had a distinctive health care model for their members. They have also pursued an extensive international health care system, in line with their Christian mission. In Sweden, SDA were in charge of Hultafors Sanatorium between 1926 and 2002. According to a sample of 164 patient records from 1939-1985, a relatively large amount of the patients throughout the whole period were diagnosed with neurosis of some kind or other mental disorders, often in combination with (other) physical ailments. In many cases, a combination of physical, psychological and social problems, difficult to handle, are displayed in the patient records. The special treatment offered at Hultafors mainly consisted of diet, hydrotherapy and other physical therapies, combined with a psychotherapeutic approach, positive thinking and an offered Christian pastoral cure for those interested. Some patients were also treated with insulin injections, and from the 1940s onward, more psychopharmacological drugs and in some cases electroshock. Women, especially, were given psychopharmacological drugs without having a diagnosis categorized as a mental disorder. The article discusses how and why these different explicit psychiatric treatment technologies were used in combination in this specific medico-religious context. Among the proposed contributing factors discussed are the Adventist non-dualistic and holistic view of mind-body, their ambition to offer the best and newest treatments possible outside psychiatric institutions and their strong links to American medicine. The development of Swedish public health care and health insurance from the 1950s also influenced patient categories at Hultafors Sanatorium.