Children at Pleiestiftelsen

Patient records and other material show that quite a lot of children and young people moved into Pleiestiftelsen. We don’t know much about what it was actually like to be a child in the hospitals, but some of the annotation in the school registers give some insight into parts of the children’s everyday lives. In 1858 we learn that Christiane Mathiasdatter was on ‘a visit at home’. It’s not hard to imagine that many of the children would have been homesick, and would have had a strong desire to visit home. Christiane’s home was at her parents’ home in Finnaas. As is common in school registers, also her father’s name, Mathias Olsen Teigland, is recorded in the register.

Other students were up to mischief in the corridor and were punished. An annotation at the bottom of a page in 1862 tells us that boys no. 2, 3 and 5 had been grounded and could not attend school the last two days of the week before Christmas. The three culprits Halvor Olsen, Johan Karlssen and Mons Gregoriussen, had been ‘careless with fire in the evening when the lamps in the corridor were lit.’ This remark from the teacher tells us that the children and young people in the hospital ran into mischief just like other children – and that they were punished for it. Being grounded was probably not an unusual punishment for such wrongdoings at the time.