Israel Hwasser
Who was Israel Hwasser?
Swedish medical doctor and professor (1790-1860)
Biographical data adapted from Wikipedia’s article on Israel Hwasser (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Biography
Israel Hwasser was born on September 17, 1790, in Älvkarleby, Sweden, to Lars Adolph Hwasser, the local vicar, and Margareta Catharina Djurman. Growing up in the vicarage, he was educated at home until he passed the studentexamen in Uppsala at fourteen. He studied medicine at Uppsala University and earned his doctorate in 1813 with a dissertation on using cold water to treat fevers, showing his unique approach to medical theory.
After his degree, Hwasser became a physician in the Swedish military during the War of the Sixth Coalition in 1813 and 1814, serving in both Germany and Norway amid the larger Napoleonic conflicts. Back in Sweden, he received advanced surgical training at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. At twenty-six, he became a Professor of Medicine at the Royal Academy of Turku in Finland under Russian rule, where his views on medicine began to change. He started believing that human behavior and moral failures caused illnesses and that healing was a divine power rather than a mechanical process.
When the Great Fire of Turku in 1827 led the Royal Academy to move to Helsinki, Hwasser relocated as well, but he left for Uppsala University in 1830. His move was partly driven by his opposition to plans that would centralize Swedish medical education at the Karolinska Institute. He remained a vocal critic of this for about thirty years, making him a controversial figure in Swedish academic medicine. His opposition to the increasingly empirical and chemistry-focused medicine of his time drew comparisons to the earlier intellectual debate between Emanuel Swedenborg and Carl Linnaeus.
Despite his controversies, Hwasser was well-regarded as a teacher. Student numbers at Uppsala increased while he was there, and he was respected by both students and colleagues for his lectures and writings. His view that medicine needed a philosophical and spiritual basis set him apart from those embracing laboratory science and chemistry. He was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1854, showing his influence as both a physician and an intellectual. Hwasser died on May 11, 1860, in Uppsala, leaving behind work that combined medicine, philosophy, and theology.
Before Fame
Hwasser grew up in a religious household in the parish of Älvkarleby, where his father was the vicar. This upbringing introduced him early on to questions of moral responsibility, human nature, and the connection between the physical and the spiritual, themes that would later shape his medical philosophy. He was educated at home, not in a formal school, yet he was skilled enough to pass the studentexamen in Uppsala at fourteen, which allowed him to attend university.
Studying medicine at Uppsala in the early nineteenth century, he encountered a tradition that still mixed classical learning with new scientific methods. He completed his doctorate in 1813 and worked as a military physician during the Napoleonic Wars, gaining firsthand experience with suffering and the limits of the medical treatments of the time, which likely contributed to his skepticism toward purely mechanistic explanations of disease and healing.
Key Achievements
- Appointed Professor of Medicine at the Royal Academy of Turku at age twenty-six in 1817
- Elected a member of the Swedish Academy in 1854, recognizing his contributions to Swedish intellectual life
- Developed an influential philosophical framework arguing that illness originates in human moral failure while healing is a divine force
- Successfully resisted plans to consolidate all Swedish medical education at the Karolinska Institute, helping preserve Uppsala's medical faculty
- Contributed to a significant increase in medical student enrollment at Uppsala University during his professorship
Did You Know?
- 01.His doctoral dissertation, defended in 1813, focused specifically on treating fevers with cold water, an approach that was debated but not without precedent in European medicine of the time.
- 02.Hwasser's philosophical opposition to Jöns Jacob Berzelius, Sweden's foremost chemist, was considered analogous by contemporaries to the earlier clash between Emanuel Swedenborg and Carl Linnaeus.
- 03.He was appointed a full professor of medicine at the Royal Academy of Turku at the age of twenty-six, making him one of the youngest professors at the institution.
- 04.Hwasser was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1854, an honor typically associated with literary and linguistic distinction rather than medical practice.
- 05.The Great Fire of Turku in 1827, one of the most destructive urban fires in Nordic history, directly caused the relocation of his institution and reshaped the course of his career.