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The role of physicians in Swedish society changed dramatically in the 19th century. The need for people not only to be healthy, but also to be seen as healthy by society gave physicians a power that often has been compared to the power of the clergy in early modern era. How might this change have affected how physicians viewed themselves and others? The historically patriarchal and later also strongly paternalistic relationship between the patient and the physician is not unknown to scholars of medical history but can be supplemented with other perspectives and source material. In this study, I shed light on how physicians who were accused of malpractice or negligence in the course of their duties. I also review how the Disciplinary Board of Swedish State Board of Medicine, responded to the merits of the accusations and to the person behind the accusation in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The words and actions of the physicians and the Disciplinary Board members towards the other party in the disciplinary cases reflect parts of the self-image and professional identity both within the medical profession and the identity which the physicians and the Disciplinary Board wished to convey outside the medical profession. It is therefore interesting to consider for whose sake the Swedish medical disciplinary board was established and run. Several conclusions have emerged during the study, including that the Swedish physicians did not need to have the patient's trust, whereas having the trust of colleagues and of the Board of Medicine appears to be essential to the physicians professional identity. Also, the stereotypical self-images of physicians as scientific, objective, and rational were contrasted with the stereotypical images of patients as subjective, naïve and ignorant, both by the accused physicians and the members of the Disciplinary Board. The indirect and direct power that the medical profession had over both their own profession and their patients perpetuated power imbalances in the patient-physician relationship. Criticism of the handling of disciplinary cases from various quarters in society and politics went unheeded as the criticism evident in the early and mid-1940s persisted also 30 years later. |
