Konsten att göra barn raka : Ortopedi och vanförevård i Sverige till 1920

Sammanfattning: This thesis deals with the establishment of orthopaedic medicine and the growth of the care of "cripples" in Sweden from the beginning of the 19th century to 1920. It elucidates medical, social and political factors of this historical process, of which the foundations were the interplay of private and public, medicine and care, and philanthropy and public health care. Ortopaedics was introduced in Sweden at the beginning of the 19th century. The treatment consisted of both correction technology and physical therapy. The study describes the contexts - for instance the arising conflict between the orthopaedists and the 'ling gymnasts' - and factors, which were significant for orthopaedics to achive both societal and medical success. During the 1890s and the first decades of the 1900s, orthopaedics became an integrated part of the growing institutional care of cripples. The aim of such care was to enable cripples to become self-supporting by means of orthopaedic treatment and vocational training. Initially, care of cripples was a private philantropic matter, but developed successively into a matter of general concern. By the end of the period studied, 1920, the crippled poor were considered as being one of society's social problems as well as a political issue. The measures aimed at aiding the cripples and the contexts in which the cripples became the object of various interventions - orthopaedics, the care, politics - reveal one significant consequence: the cripples became visible. The fact that they became visible can be seen in this historical process which defined and delimited the cripples as one group, as a social category. This occurred at different levels: in everyday life of the institutions, by means of the medical diagnoses, in the manifestations of philanthropy and in the categorization arising from the public and political debate.