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Inside “Vipeholmsanstalten”: Podcasting about Institutionalization and Memory in Sweden’s Welfare State

Black and white photo of two men in straightjackets in empty yard drawing patterns with their feet in the gravel. Both look down; one has a bald patch on the back of his head.
Residents at Vipeholm, 1953.
Photo: Hans Malmberg / Nordiska Museet.
CC BY-NC-ND


How do societies remember those once hidden behind institutional walls? And in what ways does storytelling shape our understanding of their lives?

In recent years, podcasts have become a vital tool for investigative storytelling. This is true, not least, in the Nordic countries, where journalists have frequently taken up the task of revisiting suppressed chapters of national histories. In particular, they have contributed to the critical examination of eugenic traditions and practices. For example, in 1974, Norwegian journalists Gerd Benneche and Arne Skouen published articles on the “Gro” affair (“Gro”-saken), involving an autistic girl subjected to harsh behavioral therapy, which included long periods of physical restraint. Although Benneche and Skouen’s accusation of torture was dismissed in court, the controversy sparked a nationwide debate, a government inquiry, and reforms in research ethics oversight.1 Two decades later, Dagens Nyheter’s discussion of Sweden’s forced sterilizations (1930s–1970s)2 similarly provoked public debate that led to an official inquiry into the history and extent of the program and a compensation scheme for victims. Most recently, the podcast Spiralkampagnen3 exposed Denmark’s contraception program targeting Greenlandic women, which prompted both the Danish state and the Greenlandic government to launch impartial investigations. In August 2025, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen became the first Danish leader to publicly apologize for the practice. While the results of the joint inquiry were released a month later,4 a further investigation, commissioned by the Greenlandic government and focusing particularly on the human rights and legal dimensions, is still pending.

Produced by public broadcaster P1 in 2020, the Swedish podcast Vipeholmsanstalten5 continues this investigative tradition by revisiting the history of Vipeholm Hospital, once one of Sweden’s largest institutions for people with intellectual disabilities. Through archival research, interviews, and the personal story of journalist Randi Mossige-Norheim and her uncle, former resident Inge Torkel, the podcast explores alleged cases of medical experimentation, neglect, and the silences that followed. Importantly, the podcast as a medium itself shapes the reconstruction of these events: its use of intimate voice, emotional pacing, and layered sound design creates a narrative that bridges analytical distance and fosters emotional immediacy.6

This blog post explores how the podcast Vipeholmsanstalten constructs historical knowledge about the institutionalization of intellectually disabled persons, which excluded them from Sweden’s broader society. It argues that podcasting, as a form of mediated memory, uniquely combines emotional intimacy and investigative rigor but also risks neglecting the systemic nature of institutional violence by focusing on personal narratives.

Vipeholm: Institutionalization, Exclusion and the Construction of Historical Knowledge

As a Social Democratic welfare state, the so-called People’s Home (folkhemmet), Sweden began to invest in expansive care infrastructures, public health programs, and state-supervised institutions for persons with disabilities in the early decades of the twentieth century. Yet, these welfare policies simultaneously enforced exclusionary practices that marginalized those who, for various reasons, were seen as socially “unfit.” Entanglements of care and control thus became inherent to the welfare state’s governing logic.

Opened in 1935 in repurposed military barracks near Lund, Vipeholm was an important part of this endeavor. The professor of psychiatry, inspector of care for the feebleminded, and Social Democratic member of parliament Alfred Petrén, who had already been a driving force behind the establishment of the Swedish Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala in 1922 and the Swedish Sterilisation Law of 1934, was an influential advocate for a new type of institution for persons with disabilities: one that centralized care for patients from all over the country and differentiated between needs based on gender, physical fitness, or ability to work. His involvement illustrates how the welfare state’s promise of care also included eugenic ambitions to regulate the population. Vipeholm was specifically designated for people with cognitive disabilities who were also deemed “unmanageable” or “uneducable,” labels rooted in eugenic and psychiatric ideologies that portray intellectual disability as a hereditary threat to be controlled through segregation. The institution grew to house nearly 1,000 residents, many of whom were placed there after being rejected by other facilities.7

For decades, Vipeholm remained a largely closed-off environment. Residents received basic care but otherwise little stimulation, and especially during the 1940s and 1950s, they also had to endure periods of neglect and deprivation. In Swedish public memory, the most well-known (and most notorious) aspect of Vipeholm’s history is probably the so-called caries experiments: Between 1947 and 1955, residents, many of them underage, were deliberately fed sugary foods to induce dental cavities, with the aim of establishing a – now more or less self-evident – link between sugar consumption and tooth decay, though scientific evidence about this was still sparse at the time.

Conducted with minimal oversight and little regard for consent, the experiments caused residents extreme dental pain, gave them infections, and exacerbated their malnutrition. The podcast frames these trials not as isolated ethical breaches but as emblematic of a state that rationalized welfare and care to a point that it dehumanized citizens in pursuit of scientific progress. Justified in the name of public health, the podcast portrays the experiments as deeply embedded in the structures of modern care, lauded by Vipeholm’s Chief Physician Hugo Fröderberg as “a brilliant contribution to society.”

After the experiments ended, Vipeholm continued to operate until 1982, when it became a more open nursing home. It finally closed in 1993.8 Despite the scale and severity of the abuses committed there, it was not until 2006 that the first substantial academic study on the institution and the caries experiments was published. It forms the basis for much of the podcast’s historical and contextual framing.9

Recovering Knowledge Through Personal Testimony and Familial Memory

Drawing on this historical foundation, the podcast reconstructs stories of institutional violence through a blend of personal testimony and archival fragments. Central to this is journalist Randi Mossige-Norheim’s quest to uncover the story of her uncle, Inge Torkel. Her personal journey transforms abstract history into an emotional investigation that challenges institutional silence and reveals how certain lives were made invisible behind institutional walls.

Black and white photograph of man in white lab coat before wall with shelves of dental molds. He holds one mold in his hands and examines it.
Dentist at Vipeholm with dental molds on the shelf, presumably from the Swedish Medical Board’s dental study conducted at Vipeholm, 1945–1951 (extended until 1955).
Photo: Sydsvenska Medicinhistoriska Sällskapet.
CC BY-NC-ND

The story of Mossige-Norheim’s uncle begins for her with only vague recollections – fragments of family conversations in which her uncle was barely mentioned, but, when he was, he was spoken of with fondness. As she investigates further, her personal quest becomes a means of exploring the broader mechanisms through which certain lives were rendered invisible. One of the most poignant discoveries she makes is a note by Inge Torkel’s father, Mossige-Norheim’s grandfather, written when his son was not yet four years old. It conveys the emotional turmoil of a parent navigating having a child that is “different.” The emotionality of the note stands in stark contrast to the indifferent, medically focused operations at Vipeholm, where Inge Torkel was eventually placed at age 14:

There is something strange about Inge Torkel. He says nothing. But he is our darling child. My best comfort is to think of how he smiles at me. I take Inge Torkel as he is, and in a way, my little boy expresses my own innermost attitude. He smiles and cries and forgets everything in between. Are we really getting that much further? Are our statesmen much more capable than Inge Torkel? Are the people who can speak better?

Yet, Inge Torkel’s story, as told in the podcast, also unfolds within a broader system of exclusion that operated beyond the level of individual patients and their families. At Vipeholm and other institutions, exclusion took shape through multiple, mutually reinforcing mechanisms: the systematic physical segregation of those deemed “uneducable” from mainstream society in the realms of family, school, work, and leisure; the deprivation of autonomy and consent; and the normalization of neglect under the guise of medical care. Classificatory systems rooted in racial biology and intelligence hierarchies, combined with economic pressures and bureaucratic routines, sustained an environment in which residents’ rights and identities were marginalized. At times, this social exclusion proved fatal: between 1941 and 1943, a quarter of the male patients at Vipeholm died, many after prolonged and severe weight loss after the institution failed to apply for supplementary food rations.10

From Personal Stories to Institutional Power

The podcast guides listeners through Vipeholm’s history by highlighting particular voices and experiences. Personal stories, especially those of Mossige-Norheim and her family, provide emotional entry points, but the series also strives to reveal institutional mechanisms behind the abuses.

Chief Physician Hugo Fröderberg, who shaped Vipeholm’s policies from 1935 to 1963, epitomizes the institution’s eugenic logic. His unpublished notes and scribbles, which are central to the podcast’s narrative arc, reveal beliefs in hereditary inferiority and a tacit endorsement of euthanasia reflected in parallels he drew with murderous Nazi policies. His classification system ranked residents on a scale from 0 to 6, and after death, the brains of 152 residents – including Inge Torkel – were removed without family consent and sent to Uppsala for study. Yet, Fröderberg’s did not hold fringe views. They reflected institutionalized ideologies also endorsed by the Swedish Medical Board and the Race Biological Institute. The caries experiments, for example, were not merely a rogue initiative but sanctioned at the highest political level: a united Swedish parliament voted in favor of the research in the 1940s, and the Medical Board officially justified it as being “in the interest of public health” – which, according to the podcast, fit well with Fröderberg’s view that patients on the lower intelligence scale were particularly suitable as they would not notice any pain. 

The podcast’s focus on particular figures like Fröderberg, however, points to a structural limitation of the medium: To sustain engagement, it necessarily simplifies historical complexity. In this case, the focus on Fröderberg offers dramatic clarity, but it also risks obscuring the diffuse entanglements of institutional, scientific, and commercial power like that of the confectionary industry funding the caries experiments. Institutional power operated less through spectacular acts of violence than through the everyday practices that rendered residents dependent and expendable. Although the series touches on these broader mechanisms, it tends to leave them in the background, giving priority to the more emotionally charged family narratives. These entanglements do not absolve individuals of their responsibility, but the fact that little time is devoted to them in the podcast illustrates how journalistic storytelling often favors emotional accessibility over systematic analysis or depth.

Mediating Multiple Perspectives through Letters and Interviews

Man in 3-piece woolen suit stands beside portrait of himself in a white lab coat, seated with his hands folded in his lap. Portrait stands on an easel. Bouquets of flowers are placed before it on the floor.
Chief Physician and Hospital Director Hugo Fröderberg celebrating his 50th birthday, 1947.
Photo: Sydsvenska Medicinhistoriska Sällskapet.
CC BY-NC-ND

Despite such simplifications, Vipeholmsanstalten also complicates its own narrative by mediating multiple perspectives that offer alternative ways of knowing and remembering Vipeholm’s history. Central among these are letters by resident Fritz Olof Theodor “Olle” Johansson, whose correspondence, kept at Vipeholm and sent to his family only after his death, provides rare insight into the lived experiences of institutionalization. His early letters to his mother, written from another institution before arriving at Vipeholm, express childlike longing:

Dear sweet little mummy, will mummy please send me a bottle of juice, chocolates and white caramels as well as apples and pears?

But after placement at Vipeholm, his tone shifts to frustration and quiet resistance, and he frequently asks to phone his family and be taken back to them. In one letter, he pointedly refers to Chief Physician Fröderberg as “the rudest and naughtiest,” thus speaking out within an oppressive system that sought to silence him. In another letter he even addresses Adolf Hitler directly, possibly after having learned about the war on the radio: Johansson wrote that Hitler should go back to Berlin or perhaps find a job opening at Vipeholm – as a “toilet consultant.”

The juxtaposition of Olle’s outspoken letters and Inge Torkel’s silence, remembered through his father’s reflections, reveals different modes of knowledge mediation. The podcast further extends this approach through interviews with former staff and family members. A former nurse recalls small acts of care while acknowledging structural neglect. Family members speak of shame, estrangement, and the emotional aftermath of long separations. Together, these accounts complicate binary notions of agency and illustrate the diverse ways institutionalized individuals may be represented in (both academic and popular) historical research.

Conclusion: Podcasting as a Medium of Historical Knowledge Production

History podcasts combine narrative storytelling, sound design, and archival fragments to engage audiences emotionally and intellectually. Vipeholmsanstalten exemplifies how podcasts can both recover marginalized histories and shape public memory through narrative.11 Its immediacy fosters empathy and draws listeners into the lived experiences of institutionalized individuals like Inge Torkel and Olle Johansson. Yet, Vipeholmsanstalten illustrates a more problematic aspect of the approach: its focus on personal narratives often narrows our understanding of structural violence. While the series incorporates archival research, historiographical context, and occasional gestures toward institutional critique – such as highlighting Chief Physician Fröderberg’s eugenic policies, the economic pressures shaping Vipeholm, and the caries experiments – it treats these systemic factors as secondary to the personalized narrative arc. The overlapping bureaucratic indifference, scientific rationales, and commercial interests are simplified to maintain storytelling momentum, potentially flattening the systemic complexity of how institutional power operated. 

This tension highlights a broader challenge in podcasting as a form of mediated memory. The very features that make the medium effective (intimacy, pacing, emotionality) also risk reducing structural analysis to anecdote. Recognizing this tension is essential for understanding how mediated memory not only brings neglected lives into public consciousness but also shapes the terms in which they can be understood. Vipeholmsanstalten does not fully achieve a balance between affective resonance and analytical rigor – but it does point toward the importance of such a combination, reminding us that the past is not only remembered but also actively mediated by those who narrate it. 

In this way, the podcast also highlights the contradictions of Sweden’s welfare state: a system that promised care while simultaneously legitimizing exclusion and violence against those deemed outside its social vision. The series makes this disturbingly clear when it lets Fröderberg speak for himself: “[The residents] leave no void behind at death[;] their relatives do not mourn them, rather the opposite.”

Anna Derksen is a historian and academic project manager at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony, Germany. Her research focuses on modern Nordic and disability history, with particular attention to the impact of welfare, medical, and social policies, as well as the public discourses they generated.

  1. Nadia Shad Paulsen and Anne Kveim Lie, “Forskningsetikk på dagsordenen – debattene bak de etiske komiteene,” Tidsskrift for den norske legeforening 20 (2016): 1739–43.[]
  2. See, for example, Malin Arvidsson, Att ersätta det oersättliga: statlig gottgörelse för ofrivillig sterilisering och vanvård av omhändertagna barn (Örebro: Örebro University, 2016).[]
  3. DR Radio, Spiralkampagnen, 5 episodes, 2022. []
  4. Ilisimatusarfik, Grønlands Universitet and Statens Institut for Folkesundhed, Syddansk Universitet, Uvildig udredning af antikonceptionspraksis i Kalaallit Nunaat i perioden 1960–1991, 2025.[]
  5. Sveriges Radio, Vipeholmsanstalten, 5 episodes, 2020.[]
  6. See, for example, Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); and Mieke Bal, Looking In: The Art of Viewing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).[]
  7. Kristina Engwall, “‘… äro absolut obildbara’: Barnen på Vipeholm 1935–1963,” Nordic Journal of Educational History 11, no. 1 (2024): 79–102.[]
  8. See Elin Bommenel, Sockerförsöket: Kariesexperimenten 1943–1960 på Vipeholms sjukhus för sinnesslöa (Lund: Arkiv förlag & tidskrift, 2006); and Bo Krasse, “The Vipeholm Dental Caries Study: Recollections and Reflections 50 Years Later,” Journal of Dental Research 80, no. 9 (2001): 1785–88.[]
  9. The first systematic historical research on Vipeholm Hospital was undertaken by Elin Bommenel in the 1990s and early 2000s. See Bommenel, Sockerförsöket, and Bommenel, “Hur mörk var folkhemmets baksida? Steriliseringar, amfetaminexperiment och sockerförsök,” Historielärarnas förenings årsskrift 2000/2001: 35–44. A current research project at Lund University, “Döden på Vipeholm: Ett tvärvetenskapligt forskningsprojekt,” investigates the high mortality rates at Vipeholm during the 1940s. The project has also produced three videos with English subtitles: Vipeholm: Elin Bommenel berättar, 2023.[]
  10. See the research project “Döden på Vipeholm” and the study by Thomas Kanger, Idiotanstalten: reportage om ett brott(Stockholm: Kaunitz-Olsson, 2019).[]
  11. See, for example, Siobhán McHugh, The Power of Podcasting: Telling Stories Through Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). For a scholarly analysis of another investigative podcast on the “birth control scandal” in Greenland, Spiralkampagnen, see Bolette B. Blaagaard, Stine W. Adrian, and Signe A. P. Nordsted, “How Journalism Forgets: On the Journalistic Representation of Colonial Biopower in Greenland,” Feminist Media Studies (2024): 1–16.[]

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Anna Derksen (September 12, 2025). Inside “Vipeholmsanstalten”: Podcasting about Institutionalization and Memory in Sweden’s Welfare State. History of Knowledge. Retrieved May 17, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14nl8


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