The theme of the 29th Nordic Medical History Congress is Health and Medicine under Pressure – Challenges, Controversies and Collaborations. Our aim is to bring forth examples – of individuals as well as of societal structures – that have influenced health and medicine in times of crisis. In this way, the Congress wants to highlight how collaboration as well as competition between different actors (researchers, health care workers, politicians, and patient organizations etc.) have contributed to or impeded the development of health and medicine.
Since the early 19th century, our capabilities to diagnose, cure and alleviate disease and suffering have developed at an accelerating speed. As a result, many diseases and ailments that historically threatened both individuals and entire societies, are now effectively controlled by preventive and therapeutic actions. However, the development of modern medicine has not been linear, but rather featured by setbacks and unexpected turns. Breakthroughs in medicine have often appeared from a sense of crisis. Sometimes at the expense of moral principles and with a lack of respect for the individual. Many of the challenges of contemporary medicine have historical roots, such as antibiotic resistance, recurring pandemics, vaccine hesitancy, and mental exhaustion of medical staff. Exploring
how these challenges have been dealt with historically might provide us with better opportunities for how to manage a contemporary health sector under pressure.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
A. Historical attitudes and responses to medical challenges, including for example infectious diseases, cancer, mental illnesses, and cardiovascular disease, with emphasis on controversies and collaborations in the rise and fall of different diagnostic, therapeutic, and preventive interventions.
B. How external factors (e.g. economic, political, social, and cultural factors) have affected medicine and health in the Nordic and Baltic countries throughout history, including how climate change, migration flows, shifting geopolitical ideologies, and different forms of health care narratives have put pressure on as well as provided solutions to various health care concerns.
C. How different ways of planning and practicing healthcare throughout history (such as the relationship between primary care and hospital care, academic medicine and complementary medicine, healthcare providers and patient organizations, medical experts and policymakers, pharmaceutical companies and medical practitioners) have given rise to both controversy and collaboration.
Abstracts of a maximum of 300 words and a short biography are submitted to nmhc2025@med.lu.se before November 15th, 2024. Notification of whether the abstract has been accepted will be made by December 15th, 2024. All presentations are held in English. For more information, visit the conference website: www.nmhc2025.se
The Congress is arranged by:
a) Lund University (The Section of Medical History, the Section of the History of Ideas
and Sciences, and the Birgit Rausing Centre for Medical Humanities)
b) The Medical History Society for Southern Sweden (SMHS)
c) The Association for Cultural History in Southern Sweden (Kulturen i Lund)

About the NMHC: The Nordic Medical History Congress has been organized every second year since 1967, bringing together academic scholars within the fields of medical history and medical humanities, primarily from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden. The most recent conference was held in Helsinki in May/June 2023. The first NMHC in Lund was held in 1971, chaired by Professor Bengt Lindskog.