From the late nineteenth century, coffee substitutes with alleged health-promoting effects were a frequently advertised commodity in the Swedish press. This chapter argues that competing manufacturers used a range of arguments to establish the conception that health was a choice made by conscious and rational middle-class individuals and illness, thus, was the consequence of not choosing reconciling arguments of everyday economic rationality, science, motherhood and civic duty in regard to the national economy. Advertisements targeted women, as keepers of the household economy, as major coffee consumers and as mothers of supposedly coffee-drinking children. Not choosing Swedish coffee substitutes was seen to hurt the economic independence of Sweden and created unnecessary nervous disorders and weak citizens. Physicians and politicians raised their voices against what they perceived as an increased abuse of coffee to such a level that it was politicised the years before the First World War. Nonetheless, despite these efforts, it is hard to see the success of substitutes. No matter how cheap and healthy they claimed their products to be, manufacturers of coffee substitutes were unable to convince Swedes to abandon real coffee.

The article discusses the female beauty ideal of the small foot in the Swedish press during the second half of the nineteenth century, as an object for the male gaze in fiction, as an actual fashion ideal, and as a prescribed beauty practice for women. It consists of three parts, analysing different subgenres within the press. First, I show how a male notion of the beauty and erotic attractiveness of the small foot was constructed in short stories and serial novels published in the daily and weekly press. Next, I show how this ideal was visually represented for its realization in every-day life in figures in fashion journals. Both genres presented an ideal unattainable for most women. Third, I discuss articles in dailies and weeklies giving advice on how to take care of feet, warning against ambitions to make the foot look small. Taken together, representations of female feet in the Swedish press involved a construction of the foot that also constructed women as perpetually failing in relation to the existing beauty ideal, making it part of a discursive misogynist practice, according to which women was supposed to invest in their appearance, and were derided and ridiculed when they did.

The Swedish bicameral parliament data presents a valuable textual resource that is of interest for many researches and scholars.The parliamentary texts offer many avenues for research including the study of how various affairs were run by governments over time.The Parliament proceedings are available in textual format, but in their original form, they are noisy and unstructured and thus hard to explore and investigate.In this paper, we report the transformation of the raw bicameral parliament data (1867-1970) into a structured lexical resource annotated with various word and document level attributes.The annotated data is then made searchable through two modern corpus infrastructure components which provide a wide array of corpus exploration, visualization, and comparison options.To demonstrate the practical utility of this resource, we present a case study examining the transformation of the concept of'market' over time from a tangible physical entity to an abstract idea. 

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide the first comprehensive examination of the early cannabisbasedfood products industry, using Sweden as a case study. Drawing upon historical newspaper articles andadvertisements from the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive, the authors trace the short-lived development ofthe industry, from the initial exploitation of fears of tuberculosis in the late 19th century, followed by the “boom”in hempseed extract products and the widening of its claimed effects and, finally, increased skepticism and critiques of such products across the popular press in the early 20th century.

Design/methodology/approach – A rigorous search of the Swedish Historical Newspaper Archive wasconducted to gather newspaper articles and advertisements on cannabis-based foods. The collected resourceswere scrutinized using critical discourse analysis to tease out key discourses at work, particularly around theconcepts of health, nutrition and science.

Findings – The authors find that central to the marketization of cannabis-based foods was the construction ofdisease based on scientific and medical discourse, fearmongering to create a strong consumer base and individualization to place responsibility on consumers to take action to protect their family’s health. This demonstrates not only the long historical relationship between science and food marketing but also how brands’ health claims could often be fraudulent or overstated.

Originality/value – It is important to cast a historical lens on the commercialization of cannabis-basedfood products because demand for similar types of products has rapidly grown over the past decade. Now, just as before, manufacturers tap into consumers’ insecurities about health, and many of the same questions continue to be mooted about products’ safety. Paying greater attention to the broader and problematic history of commercial cannabis can, thus, serve as a reminder for both consumers and policymakers to think twice about whether hemp really is for health and if the claims it espouses are a mirage rather than a miracle.

This paper offers the first case study of Phospho-Energon — an early twentieth-century Swedish patent medicine believed to cure nervousness. Using a large dataset of newspaper advertisements, it explores how the product was presented through scientific and medical language, which drew upon a range of visual and verbal rhetoric to convince consumers of its benefits. It finds that pseudoscientific discourse focusing on self-help was regularly used to sell Phospho-Energon, with consumers warned that their nerves were “not allowed to fail” and required “protection” in order to remain healthy. Furthermore, the “science” supporting this discourse gradually shifted over time as neurosis replaced neurasthenia as a diagnostic category and the concept of spring lethargy became popularised. Overall, this study argues that Phospho-Energon stands as an important example of how partial scientific/medical claims can be used as a rhetorical device to sell products to consumers looking for a quick-fix cure for their perceived mental health conditions.

The article analyses the male body-biased gaze in serial fiction in the Swedish press 1850–1890, by using the concept of the body flâneur as an analogy to the well-known city flâneur. The normative construct of the body flâneur was a discursive practice, normalising the male gaze in media representations in period still poor on visual representations. It gave authors an opportunity to describe, in detail and in an educated manner, female bodies as aesthetic objects. It had a twofold educational function. First, the body flâneur taught readers, both female and male, what the ideal female body looked like and how it could be detailed in words, but also that the woman was a natural object of scrutiny, and a field of expertise. Second, it presented to readers to various conceivable female reactions to being stared at.