I am a doctoral student in Nordic history at Åbo Akademi University. In my dissertation, I investigate how the social elite in Finland and partly in Sweden approached health and illness during the long 19th century, and how their perceptions of these two concepts influenced how they shaped their daily lives. I do not focus on the perspective of physicians; instead, I examine a large amount of family correspondence and some diary materials within a network of affluent families in Finland from the late 18th century to the late 19th century.

In the material, I examine how members of these families described illnesses, which disease names they used, the treatments they relied on, the nature of their relationship with doctors, and their beliefs about how one should live to lead a healthy life. In addition to the dissertation's subject, I am interested in the cultural history of the same period, as well as emotional history. For example, I have also explored how the social elite in Finland dealt with grief and death during this time.