The main purpose of this thesis is to study and analyze how concepts of childhood and adolescence were constructed in scientific medicine during the period 1870 to 1930. The focus in the first part of the thesis is to study the sick girl as a stereotype in 1870–1900. In the late nineteenth-century, the poor health of girls was a popular topic in Swedish medical discourse. It was a well-established opinion that a substantial number of Swedish girls suffered from various diseases and ailments. Mass- and coeducation was under debate and physicians became interested in the impact of schools and schooling on children’s health. It is here shown that children, and in particularly adolescents, were de-fined as gendered creatures. The doctors emphasized the universal nature of adolescence and conceptualized pu-berty as a traumatic and risky stage of life and they also tended to focus on middle-class girls. Pubescent girls were seen as most vulnerable to external stress such as mental strain and physical demands. Physicians claimed that ill health inevitably followed when girls were educated in the same way as boys. However, boys and their health were discussed too. The most common ailments for both girls and boys were overstudy, anemia, headaches and disor-dered digestion. It was also shown in various studies, that poorer children were substantially inferior in weight as well as in height. Chlorosis was a common theme in late nineteenth-century medical discourse. Although it appeared mainly as a girls’ disease in medical books and in most sanitary journals, health studies for example, showed that chlorosis could also be a boys’ disease. However, sick boys were rarely spoken of. Medical opinions on overstudy, chlorosis and dress reform could be interpreted as a concern for unhealthy girls as future mothers of the nation. It is not my intention to advertise doctors as vicious oppressors, as opponents of female emancipation. In fact, the doctors often pointed out social factors and unequal circumstances of childhood and adolescence for girls and boys. In early twentieth-century, the scientific opinion of girls changed. Even though gendered notions of children and youths persisted all through the period studied, more and more some doctors, Karolina Widerström, for example, began to question them. The new girl was not weak and ill, but rather healthy and active. However, a dividing line between those who claimed the weakness of girls and those who emphasized the new, healthy girl became more evident after 1900. In this thesis, this disparity is discussed in terms of popular medical discourse and scientific medi-cal discourse. In the latter, girls were still described as more sensitive and more frail than boys and as unfit for higher education and strenuous schoolwork. Thus, the new girl – vivid, healthy and equal to the boy – was above all a con-struction in popular medicine. The uniform medical discourse on girls from the late nineteenth-century thus dissolved. A number of changes in the medical discourse on sickness and health of girls and boys during in this period occurred. First, concepts of sickness and health were modified over time and fewer schoolchildren were considered sick. Fi-nally, in the beginning of the period studied, girls were sicker than boys were, but in the end, in the 1930s, there was no obvious gender difference. Both sexes seemed equally sick (or healthy).

This thesis focuses on the significance of blood and the perception of the body in both learned and popular culture in order to investigate problems of identity and social exclusion in early modern Europe. Starting from the view of blood as a liminal matter, manifesting fertile, positive aspects in conjunction with dangerous, negative ones, I show how it was believed to attract supernatural forces within the natural world. It could empower or pollute, restore health or waste corporeal and spiritual existence. While this theme has been studied in a medieval religious context and by anthropologists, its relevance during the early modern period has not been explored. I argue that, considering the impact of the Reformation on people’s mentalities, studying the way in which ideas regarding blood and the body changed from late medieval times to the eighteenth century can provide new insights about patterns of social and religious tensions, such as the witch-trials and persecutions. In this regard the thesis engages with anthropological theories, comparing the dialectic between blood and body with that between identity and society, demonstrating that they both spread from the conflict of life with death, leading to the social embodiment or to the rejection of an individual. A comparative approach is also employed to analyze blood symbolism in Protestant and Catholic countries, and to discuss how beliefs were influenced by both cultural similarities and religious differences. Combining historical sources, such as witches’ confessions, with appropriate examples from anthropology I also examine a corpus of popular ideas, which resisted to theological and learned notions or slowly merged with them. Blood had different meanings for different sections of society, embodying both the physical struggle for life and the spiritual value of the Christian soul. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 develop the dualism of the fluid in late medieval and early modern ritual murder accusations against Jews, European witchcraft and supernatural beliefs and in the medical and philosophical knowledge, while chapters 5 and 6 focus on blood themes in Protestant England and in Counter-Reformation Italy. Through the examination of blood in these contexts I hope to demonstrate that contrasting feelings, fears and beliefs related to dangerous or extraordinary individuals, such as Jews, witches, and Catholic saints, but also superhuman beings such as fairies, vampires and werewolves, were rooted in the perception of the body as an unstable substance, that was at the base of ethnic, religious and gender stereotypes.