ABSTRACT
In the 1950s, an extensive drinking water fluoridation study was conducted in secrecy in the Swedish town of Norrköping. A network of prominent scientists coalesced around the study, eventually managing to turn its aims into national political ambitions in the making of the 1962 Water Fluoridation Act – a law which, although it was never put to use, was explicitly created to enable the Norrköping study to continue, after it had been deemed illegal by a national court. Departing from Sheila Jasanoff’s concept of co-production, which highlights the simultaneous making of scientific knowledge and social order, this chapter explores the Norrköping study and argues that the combined scientific and public health underpinnings of the fluoridation were crucial throughout the process. The case is presented as an illuminating one for studying the entanglement of science and the state, and it is contextualised in terms of the changing dynamics of the state-citizen contract in Sweden. This uncovers ideas about individual rights and liberties in relation to state power in the field of public health, where a critique of the paternalistic and far-reaching state apparatus in Sweden was formulated earlier than might have been generally assumed.
