I have been looking for something interesting to post from Digitalt Museum, and I wanted something darker from the history of Sweden to contrast the mostly positive posts I have posted in the past.
This is the only photo I could find of the Vipeholm facility, a facility built to care to the mentally unwell in Sweden.
In Swedish, this facility was called “sinnesslöanstalten”, or “the facility for slow minded people”.
Mental health care at the time was not good, one good example of how bad it could be was that when the facility at Vipeholm opened in the south of Sweden, it exclusively took in “patients” from the northern most regions of Sweden, to keep the patients as far apart from their families as possible. The facility also had trouble staying staffed, with one doctor in the 1960 commenting that he wasn’t an animal keeper while comparing the facility to a Zoo.
Between 1945 and 1955 the facility at Vipeholm was used as the site for a human dental experiment.
Let that sink in for a minute, a facility for the care of patients with severe mental issues, far away from their support network, was used in a human dental experiment…
It gets bad…
In 1942 dental health was BAD in Sweden, 99.9% of all conscripted soldiers was afflicted by tooth decay. Back in 1938, the government had instituted “Folktandvården” a government run system of dentist clinics, but due to a strained budget, focus quickly turned on the mounting costs for providing dental care where the entire population was in some way afflicted by tooth decay.
This was at a time when we didn’t know what caused tooth decay, so we didn’t know how to prevent it.
So research was needed, there was already suspicions that sugar had something to do with it, but that was far from confirmed.
So, an experiment was called for, an experiment where two things were to be figured out.
- What causes tooth decay?
- How do we stop it?
It was quickly determined that this needed to be a human experiment, and for it to work, there would be a need to completely control the subject’s intake of food, making sure that they ate specifically what they were supposed to, nothing more, nothing less.
The facility at Vipeholm fit the criteria very well, especially since at the time it was known as a place for the “hard to care for, uneducatable, slow minded people” .
The experiment started as WWII died down around us, at first there was a focus on vitamins to see if they could improve the health of the teeth, this improved the general health of the subjects, but had no real impact on their teeth.
There was an experiment with different types of bread, but that produced no real data.
Then the remit of the experiment changed, it had started as a way to prevent or reverse tooth decay, but now shifted 180 degrees, now the goal was to provoke tooth decay to find what was causing it.
At no point was consent ever gathered, neither from the patients, nor from their families. The government was also not informed until the experiment was completed
This new version of the experiment split the facility into separate groups, all still got the vitamins from earlier, and a baseline food intake of 1800kcal/day:
The control group only got that amount of food, but other groups got more things on top the baseline, 150g margarine, 300g sugar in their drink, fresh bread and stale (24h old) bread.
Then there was the final group, who on top of the baseline also recieved the following: 150-250g sugar in their drink, as well as plenty of specially made large, super sticky toffies, these were made to be as sticky as possible to stick to the teeth of the subjects. The taste was changed to keep the subjects interested in eating the toffies.
This caused, as you would imagine a lot of dammage to the teeth, with decay going all the way into the center of some teeth.
Dentists were brought in to repair the dammage, but only after the conclusion of the experiment.
The experiment has been cited as having helped improve dental care both in and outside Sweden.
During the experiment tooth decay could be mapped throughout, and the results changed how Folktandvården worked, it went from fixing to preventing.
It also showed that a single large consumption of sugar once a week was less bad than a low but steady consumption of sugar all week.
The ethical side of the experiment was never considered an issue at the time, with some people arguing that the subjects should have been happy as they were able to contribute back to society that had spent a lot of money caring for them, nevermind that it is doubtful that the subjects would even understand the concept.
While the subjects themselves were not capable of telling their own story, it is clear to anyone having experienced tooth decay that they must have been in a lot of pain, there have been several studies on both the dental health recorded and the ethics involved in this experiment.
There is plenty more to read if you google Vipeholm.
The photograph was taken in 1954, while the experiment was still going, the photographer was Hans Malmberg, the photo is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND.