The conference “Explorations in Medical History in the Baltic Sea Region 1850–2015” in 2014 took place at the Lund University in Sweden, financially supported by the Department for the History of Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine belonging to the Lund University. As the current head of this department (founded in 1981) I am glad that two young researchers, Nils Hansson and Jonatan Wistrand, organized and documented this successful conference. I am grateful for their work and would like to thank them both on behalf of the department. The Department for the History of Medicine in Lund works at the interface of medicine, culture, and society, and has a keen ambition to bring the more overarching theme of medical humanities into our discipline. This manifests in, for example, a close collaboration with scholars of art and literature as well as other areas of the humanistic sciences at Lund University and abroad.

It is noteworthy that our Lund University of today is 350 years old and located closer to the continent than other contemporary Swedish universities. This has influenced us through many and rich contacts with the countries bordering the southern shores of the Baltic Sea. Ever since Hanseatic times this region has been vibrant in culture, commerce, and science. We have therefore in contemporary times tried to develop our contacts with especially Denmark and Germany, but also with Poland and the Baltic states. We believe that we have benefited from strong historical contacts with our neighbors and this is also relevant for the history of medicine from the perspective of the conference.

I welcome the reader to this collection of some of the most interesting papers presented during the conference, carefully edited by Nils Hansson and Jonatan Wistrand.