A Task-Oriented Approach to Human and Equine Health and Ability in Early Modern Sweden

Abstract Taking its departure from the dependence on human and equine bodies to be healthy and capable of performing their various tasks in early modern societies, the article studies what notions of human and equine health and ability ordinary people embraced, by using a large sample of court cases from Sweden. It is shown that people made sense of human and equine illness as physical weaknesses or as bodily subjugations by disease entities, and that it was not meaningful to differentiate between illness and injury, since a diminished capacity for work was at the core. Particular yardsticks of capability are also identified, in relation to which people’s and horses’ abilities to carry out alternative tasks were assessed. Importantly, it is shown that people did not depart from universal categories of human or equine physiology, but from how individual men, women, and horses used to be and be able to perform certain tasks. An implicit framework of a task-oriented functionality for working bodies is identified, which, it is finally suggested, shows similarities with and predates mechanistic physiology. It is thus suggested that working people’s task-oriented ways of understanding working bodies should be considered in historical studies of the rise of mechanism.