Introduction

The chapter examines mental health care in early modern Swedish local communities, and in particular the religious activities that were aimed at finding cures for or alleviating madness and mental disturbances. After briefly providing background about the role of religion in medicine and healing in the early modern culture, the chapter discusses the spiritual healing practices carried out at the local level, in particular by local clergy and the rural lay communities, in early modern Sweden (including Finland) during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (c. 1600s–1730s). This time frame covers the era when the Swedish Realm was at its largest and the period of Lutheran Orthodoxy. This period is characterised as a time when religion was an integral part of medicine. Moreover, this is a time when many new natural-scientific and medical ideas, and the professionalisation and ‘secularisation’ of medicine, were only slowly contributing to the healing practices in the northern periphery of Europe.

A court record from southwestern Finland from 1700 offers a starting point and a good example about the ways religion, and churchmen, were involved in healthcare. Around the year 1680 Brita, a soldier's widow in her late fifties, lost her mind, or started suffering from an undetermined ‘weakness in the head’ (Swe. hufwud swaghet).