Social medicine, as it was conceived of by left-wing medical doctors in Scandinavia from the 1930s became influential in the creation of a new role for medicine in the making of “the good society” and the political radicalism of social medicine was assimilated into the dominant, social democratic ideology. Several of the pioneers of the left-wing social medicine that had previously aimed for a disruption of the power balances in society, acquired hegemonic positions within the state medical bureaucracy. They constituted an expertise that, by and large, was responsible for the shaping of the national health policies in the “golden age” of the Scandinavian social democratic welfare states (1940s–70s). In this chapter, we discuss the coming into being and passing away of social medicine in the Scandinavian welfare states, exploring how it unfolded in the late twentieth century, in the clinic, in academia, and in health policy. We argue that in spite of its dominance within the central health bureaucracy, social medicine never managed to penetrate mainstream medicine and it left perhaps its strongest footprint abroad, in the field of international health.