The purpose of the paper is twofold. First, it seeks to appreciate key events in the development of the Finnish

health system and in particular those of the hospital system over the last two centuries. In doing

so, the paper analyses the mutual influence among emergent organisational and clinical routines for the evolving body of

medical scientific knowledge and the system for the training of doctors. The second objective of the paper is to

focus on one specific actor in this evolutionary process, namely university hospitals, a specific form of organisation emerged in the post

-war period.