Uppsala’s Museum of Medical History occupies a 1900 administration building at Ulleråker, once one of Sweden’s largest psychiatric hospital sites. Its collections connect medical instruments, pharmacy, folk remedies and the lives of patients and staff at Ulleråker with more than three centuries of local healthcare history.
Quick facts
The museum opened in 1995 in a 1900 building originally used for administration at Uppsala Hospital and Asylum in Ulleråker.
Lars Thorén began collecting medical instruments and apparatus decades before the museum opened; his collections included material from Akademiska sjukhuset and university teaching collections.
The former Psychiatric History Museum became part of the Museum of Medical History in January 2013, bringing Ulleråker’s psychiatric care history into the museum’s permanent scope.
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The Museum of Medical History stands in Ulleråker, south of central Uppsala, inside a building that once helped run the hospital complex around it. The museum’s setting matters: this is not only a collection about healthcare, but a former institutional landscape where generations of patients, nurses, doctors and other staff lived and worked. Today the museum brings together histories of bodily medicine, pharmacy and psychiatric care, with objects drawn from hospitals, university teaching and research.
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