At the heart of ''the Nordic model of welfare'' is a strong will for national integration and social equality between citizens and regions. It is commonly held that that ''ethnic homogeneity'' is one explanatory factor behind the Nordic model of welfare. On the contrary, we claim that it is the political will to treat the population as homogeneous that influenced the creation of the model, not any factual ethnic homogeneity (which is, after all, a historical fiction, also in the Nordic context). Thus, the pursuit of integration and the strive for regional equality have challenged local autonomy and cultural diversity while at the same time underpinned arguments for a regionalization of politics and, to some extent, for ethnic particularization. Drawn between a strong state and local authority, universalism and particularization, welfare and health policies have reshaped the relationship between center and peripheries and between the majority and ethnic minorities.The integration of the county of Finnmark into the national system of institutionalized welfare in Norway after World War II constitutes a good case to investigate not only the will, but also the ability, for national integration and equalization along the dimensions of centreÁperiphery and majorityÁminority relations, not only because of the county's position furthest to the north, but also because it held the largest minority populations. This article examines Norwegian policies to establish and effect equality between Finnmark and other regions in the field of health care facilities from 1945 until the 1970s, and the attempts to establish equal access to health services between the Sámi minority and the Norwegian majority population in Finnmark. It sheds light upon how the immanent conflict between the ideals of a national, universal welfare policy and particular measures in favor of the Sámi was conceived in the period. (The authors expected multi-culturality to be clearly visible in the sources. It was, but only with regard to one minority group, the Sámi. The Kvens were not discussed by the policy-makers in the period.) Furthermore, it has been argued that in the shaping and implementation of Norwegian health policies in the first years after World War II, primacy was given to expert knowledge. A particular point of interest in this article is how this primacy manifested itself in the choices of political strategies of universalism and particularism within the field of health policy in this particular geographical setting.

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TEEMU RYYMIN* The relationship between children and tuberculosis became an increasingly important focus of attention during the early twentieth century. Internationally, various aspects of the history of the struggle against children's tuberculosis have been studied by, among others, Linda Bryder and Cynthia Connolly, who have particularly devoted their attention to the construction of the category of ''pre-tuberculous children'' and its practical consequences in terms of policies of institutions and prevention in Britain, the United States, Germany and France in the interwar years. 1 In this article I discuss the development of a similar concept in Norway, where children's tuberculosis became a significant part of the efforts against the disease especially in the 1920s. I pay particular attention to how an international corpus of knowledge about the relationship between children and tuberculosis that was established in the early 1900s was implemented in the Norwegian anti-tuberculosis work in the first half of the century. In Norway, the category that was created to identify children at risk of tuberculosis was straightforward: the ''tuberculosis-threatened child'' (''tuberkulosetruet barn''). How was this category constructed by medical research, and did it result in similar practices in Norway as elsewhere? Whereas Bryder and Connolly focus mainly on the establishment of the category of ''pre-tuberculous children'' in the early 1900s and the subsequent practice in the 1920s and 1930s in the institutions developed to deal with such children, I shall discuss the wider social, economic and medical developments in Norway that transformed the concept and its related practices from the late 1930s to the 1950s. Norwegian tuberculosis mortality peaked around 1900 with approximately 6,000 deaths (31 per 10,000 inhabitants) a year. During the 1890s, medical doctors had struggled to raise the state's consciousness about the severity of the problem, and in 1900 the Norwegian parliament passed a national Tuberculosis Act that defined the general structure for a public health campaign against the disease. The Act was primarily based on a strategy of isolation of disease carriers that was derived from an understanding of the disease's bacteriological origin. According to the Act, people deemed potentially dangerous sources of infection, particularly if they lived under conditions that did not permit isolation in their own homes, could be committed to institutional care, by force if necessary. On the basis of this legislation, the state and several voluntary associations, notably the Norwegian