In The Archaeology of Knowledge Michel Foucault teaches us to discard or at least decentre the historical subject and to call all the unquestioned continuities by which we organize the discourses we want to analyse in question. The aim of this study is to discuss the implications of such a theoretical approach when it is applied to a scholarly project that focuses on a certain historical individual, the Swedish psychiatrist, Bror Gadelius, and his role in the formation of a specific discursive formation, early 20th-century psychiatry in Sweden.