From weak chests to throat operations – noble women and their perceptions of health and illness in Finland during the long 19th century

Beskrivning

Female bodies and illnesses have been a reoccurring theme within medical historic research. The focus often lies on mental illness and on the late 19th or beginning of the 20th century. The perspective is often the onlooker’s, the physicians’, the institutions’, or the society’s. Women, especially in a medical historic context from the 19th century, are often portrayed as victims taking on a sick role, and their own voice as well as a wider perspective is often lacking.
In my presentation I analyze women’s own view of health and illness, their medical knowledge, and beliefs as well as their treatments and their relation to physicians. From a wide range of letters stretching over a period from the end of the 18th century to the end of the 19th century, written by women belonging to the social elite in Finland and by members of their closest families, my aim is to vary the picture we have of women and their health and illnesses during the 19th century. I show the changes that happen during this century, in women’s understanding of treating and counteracting disease as well as their understanding of the body. I also show that women in fact weren’t so keen to take on a sick role as has been suggested in earlier research, and they weren’t always victims. I show how they instead very much took responsibility for their own health and that their health and well-being was something that concerned their whole family. This in turn adds to medical historic research, to cultural research on noble women in the 19th century, and it also adds to research concerning women’s position in a family and social context.

Period	6 sep. 2024
Evenemangstitel	16th Annual Conference of the International Society for Cultural History: Embodied Histories: Cultural History of, in, and through the Human Body
Typ av evenemang	Konferens
Plats	Potsdam, TysklandVisa på karta
Omfattning	Internationell