ABSTRACT
A fundamental feature of Norwegian public health work since the 1860s has been the conviction that reforming popular culture could prevent disease and promote health. The aim of many medical doctors and state public health officials in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Norway was to inculcate a healthy ‘culture’ where it was deemed absent. The culture promoted was one defined as healthy by mostly middle-class medical doctors and representatives of the state medical establishment; the lifestyles and ‘bad habits’ that were to be changed or discarded altogether could vary depending on factors relating to gender, class, or spatial dimensions – for example, rural and remote regions.
