Clinical practice, health care provision, and medical research cannot be performed without the help of medical technologies, from neonatal technologies to technologies of aging and terminal care. Many are the results of recent technoscientific innovations in molecular biology or computer science, or of combinations of biotechnology and information technology, including Big Data and machine learning. They are used for maintaining and modifying bodies with the help of machines, pills, devices, and “foreign” tissues and organs; representing and visualizing bodies; and for reproductive purposes. Medical technologies circulate in an international “technoscape” of pharmaceuticals, devices, machines, procedures, and understandings. They alter local practices, cultures, and institutional structures but are also adapted and modified to function in specific health care situations. Their use raises issues of inequality in access to care, of patient safety and control, and mobilizes constellations of actors, including patient groups, multinational companies, and national and international regulators.

Pellagra – ett vackert namn på en otäck sjukdom.

Idag nästan okänd, men i 1800-talets Sydeuropa och i det tidiga 1900-talets USA drabbade den miljontals människor. De fick sårig hud och svåra magbekymmer. De blev fullständigt utmattade. Många blev vansinniga. Hundratusentals dog. Sjukdomen drabbade bara de fattiga, exploaterade människorna på landsbygden. Dess orsak var länge ett mysterium.

Boken följer de vetenskapliga ansträngningar som efter mer än hundra års forskning ledde till svaret på pellagras gåta. Den var en bristsjukdom, orsakad av för lite vitamin B3 (niacin) i de fattigas kost. Ytterst berodde den på misär och exploatering i områden präglade av odling av en enda gröda – av majs i Italien, av bomull i USA. Forskarnas dagliga möda, den kunskap de hade tillgång till, de återvändsgränder de gav sig in i men också deras nydanande undersökningar gestaltas här mot en fond av politiska konflikter och genomgripande ekonomiska förändringar.

Historien om pellagra ger därmed insikter som är relevanta än idag om hur fattigdom, mat och hälsa hänger samman samt om vetenskapens tidsbundna arbetssätt och kopplingar till politik och etik, till personliga ambitioner och kollektiva ideal.

The book Food, Misery and a Medical Mystery (In Swedish 2024) is about pellagra, a nasty, now almost unknown disease that affected millions of people in 19th-century southern Europe and the early 20th-century United States. Patients suffered from sore skin, exhaustion and severe stomach problems. Many went insane. Hundreds of thousands died. The disease only affected the poor, exploited people in rural areas. What caused it was long a mystery.

Only after more than 150 years of scientific research was the riddle of pellagra answered. It was a deficiency disease, caused by too little vitamin B3 (niacin) in the diet of the poor. Ultimately, it was caused by poverty and exploitation in areas characterised by a single crop -– corn in Italy, cotton in the US. The daily struggles of the researchers, the knowledge they had access to, the dead ends they faced – but also their groundbreaking research – are portrayed in the book against a background of political conflict and wide-ranging economic change.

English synopsis avaible:https://arkiv.nu/wp-content/uploads/English-synopsis-pellagra.pdf

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In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure for tuberculosis, pellagra and anemia; proposed it as a means to reanimate seemingly dead soldiers on the battlefield. It was a contested therapy because it meant crossing boundaries and challenging taboos. Was the transfusion of lamb blood into desperately sick humans really defensible?

The book takes the reader on a journey into hospital wards and lunatic asylums, physiological laboratories and 19th century wars. It presents a fascinating story of medical knowledge, ambitions and concerns – a story that provides lessons for current debates on the morality of medical experimentation and care.

I artikeln undersöks hur vetenskaplig kunskap om blodgruppers nedärvning infogadesi politiska beslut och rättsliga överväganden om påstått faderskap från1920-talets mitt och framåt. Syftet var att skapa rättvisa för kanske felaktigt utpekadefäder till utomäktenskapliga barn och därmed avföra ett uppfattat socialtproblem från dagordningen. Blodanalysens vetenskapliga och rättsliga bevisvärdevar dock omdiskuterat. Dess införande innebar en biologisering av synen på faderskap,och en ökad betydelse av medicinsk expertis i rättsliga beslut.

From the mid-1920s, scientific knowledge about the heredity of blood groups was introduced into politics and court cases about disputed paternity in Sweden. The aim was to protect men who, perhaps wrongly, had been singled out as fathers of extramarital children. In 1917 a Swedish law that stated that all children should have a recognized father who should also pay for the child’s support was adopted. If the alleged father refused to acknowledge the child, the case would go to court. The court decided the case on information that the couple had had intercourse at a time when the child could have been conceived. In such case the man was deemed the likely father. The law was seen as a great step forward for unmarried mothers and their children.

In the mid-1920s, an animated debate questioned the provision of the law that gave women the right to single out a particular man as the father under oath. It was argued that ”loose women” would select a particular man among several possible fathers to receive the highest possible allowance. The new technique of blood group analysis was seen by experts and left-wing and women’s movement actors as a possible and objective means to determine the truth and save the law.

Based on the concept of technopolitics and on theories of the social construction of a social problem – in this case men’s presumed lack of legal protection – and of ”loose women” as a risk object, the article discusses the controversies around the scientific validity of the blood group tests and the efforts to make scientific evidence be counted in court. It documents the steps towards a parliamentary decision that would lead to a 1933 law, among the first in the world to make blood tests mandatory for women in court cases about disputed paternity. The analysis is based on contemporary media, official investigations and statistics, and cases that reached the Supreme Court. The article discusses the contradictory notions within science and the law about what would count as evidence and truth, and locates the Swedish experience in an international context, comparing the very different roles of expert knowledge in court proceedings in different countries. The example of blood group analysis in disputed paternity cases shows how biotechnology was introduced into the contested terrain of interwar sexual, family and welfare politics, contributing to the biologization of the notion of fatherhood and to an increasing use of medical expertise in court.

”Sociologin är inte på väg någonstans av sig självt utan vi styr den med våra val och med vad vi gör och avstår från att göra. Skulle jag sörja om sociologin upphörde, om bara exempelvis ämnena kulturgeografi, ekonomi, psykologi och statskunskap fanns kvar?” (Hedvig Ekerwald) Akademiska ämnen samlar ibland ihop sig till återblickar. Erfarna företrädare för ämnet sammanfattar och värderar dess historia och föreslår möjliga framtida vägar i en antologi. I denna specialutgåva av Sociologisk Forskning, i samarbete med Liber, publiceras 14 framstående sociologers beskrivningar av ämnets utvecklingsförlopp tillsammans med den parallella formeringen av deras egna akademiska habitus. Genom personligt hållna betraktelser – en slags akademiska självbiografier – tecknar boken en bred bild av ämnets histo¬ria och nuvarande villkor, en bild från vilken den svenska sociologin kan ta avstamp och blicka framåt."