[Historiography of diseases in Finland]

The 19th century was a period of comprehensive, "big" histories of diseases. German historiographers of diseases were especially prominent. World-famous is August Hirsch's Handbuch der historisch-geographischen Pathologie (the second edition appeared in three volumes in 1881-1886). The first volume of the Finn Immanuel Ilmoni's (1797-1856) Bidrag till Nordens sjukdoms-historia (A History of Diseases in the Nordic Countries) was published in 1846, the second volume in 1849 and the third in 1853. In this book Ilmoni treated the history of disease up to the year 1800. He planned a fourth volume, dealing with the 19th century, but this book was never published. Ilmoni was strongly influenced by the ideas of Thomas Sydenham and the German exponents of Naturphilosophie. Ilmoni's "ontological" concept of disease was rejected by Erik Alexander Ingman, a contemporary Finnish representative of "modern" medical ideas. After Ilmoni, nobody has attempted to write a comprehensive history of diseases in Finland, but histories of cholera (Carl Qvist, 1872) lepra (Lars Fagerlund, 1886), malaria (Richard Sievers, 1891) and pulmonary tuberculosis (Woldemar Backman and Severi Savonen, 1934) have been published. Diseases in Finland received very little attention in the "world histories" of diseases. After Hirsch only one comprehensive "world history" of diseases has been published (1993).