Introduction

In a poem entitled ‘Halse-Prijs’ (Eng. ‘In praise of health’), the Swedish seventeenth-century poet, scholar, and civil servant Georg Stiernhielm concluded that ‘all is nothing, where health is not.’ To Stiernhielm, money, power, and worldly honours were all useless if he was not healthy. He explained that the person who is favoured with health ‘lives happy in daily joy, without sorrows,’ until the day he falls ill, and then all good fortune is lost. To Stiernhielm's early modern reader, the poem ‘Halse-Prijs’ would have been recognisable as a reference to the literary theme that fortune is fickle: it is well to remember that riches can vanish quickly. To the modern reader, the poem appears to express familiar present-day sentiments regarding how highly we value good health. Yet this is also a poem that raises questions.

Stiernhielm was born in Dalecarlia in central Sweden in 1598, and he died in Stockholm in 1672. He lived in a time and a society without antiseptic surgery, extensive healthcare, welfare institutions, or modern notions of cleanliness, for that matter. In light of this, we cannot assume that ‘health’ was understood the same way to Stiernhielm as it is conceptualised today. What did Stiernhielm actually praise in his poem? When was a person considered healthy in early modern society, and when were they deemed ill?