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This chapter is about hospitals (institutions for the treatment of the bodily sick) in the Nordic countries, with special focus on urban and regional authorities. The two leading capitals of Scandinavia have for long been Copenhagen and Stockholm, and modern hospitals were established in both cities in the 1750s. In Denmark including Norway, provincial hospitals grew in number but remained small and were mostly locally funded well into the 19th or sometimes even the 20th century. In Sweden including Finland, provincial hospitals were situated in regional capitals. These had the capacity to grow when medical efficiency increased in the 1870s. After 1945, in all countries, a select number of hospitals developed into larger teaching hospitals with specialist medicine and surgery as well as research faculties. Hospitals helped establish the role of cities as regional capitals. Recently, the borders of hospital regions have been more prone to change in Denmark and in Norway. Also the importance of general practitioners (more common in Denmark) and the professional leadership of collegia medica are discussed.

Sartre’s seriality: Existential conceptualizations and an excursus on the Corona crisisIn his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) Sartre tried to clarify the dialectic betweendifferent levels of understanding, between theory and existential or factual praxis.Within the material realm of praxis, there are two forms of mediation: the group(oriented by a common interest) and the series. A series is an ordered gathering,such as a queue; but can also be the audience that listens to the radio; or the activityof smuggling gold out of Spain, in the 16th century. Sartre is unwilling to callseriality a concept, and I concur by emphasizing the variability of the phenomenonbut also its usefulness as a political term. I demonstrate that a pattern can befound among Sartre’s examples of seriality: a series can either be active or passive,reflective or unreflective. However, a series which is both active and reflected is ananomaly, since this means that the series transforms into the other form of mediation,the group, or even ”an organized Apocalypse”. In a short excursus I apply theseforms of seriality to the spring 2020 Corona crisis, where the political problem ofchoosing between patience and impatience is touched upon.