Relocation of the library/laboratory in 1895

When the last patients at Lungegård Hospital were transferred to Pleiestiftelsen in 1895, H. P. Lie ensured that the library and laboratory were also moved there. That same year, Lie was employed as the head physician and the superintendent at Pleiestiftelsen. In the annual report for the period 1895–1898, he describes how both the laboratory and the library were installed ‘with considerable difficulty’ in ‘Pleiestiftelsen’s old and impractical rooms’.

The annual report also describes how the nature of the hospital changed from being purely a care institution to encompassing ‘treatment trials and scientific research’, something that was previously linked to Lungegård Hospital. Nicolai Ordahl, who was employed at the hospital in 1898–1999, states that Lie was not the only doctor working at the hospital, and describes how both Hansen and Loennecken would constantly be cultivating bacterial cultures and studying specimens through microscopes.

Ordahl also mentions a pharmacy next to the laboratory and the doctor’s office. There were shelves of medicines and instruments on one wall, and behind a curtain, in a corner on the opposite side of the room, was where the cup setter slept. He was the doctor’s assistant, the role Ordahl himself had. This room is no longer preserved and was most likely altered when most of this wing was used for tuberculosis patients sometime after 1900.

Reidar Melsom, who left the hospital in 1957, was the head physician at Pleiestiftelsen Hospital. His daughter Aase Maurseth, who grew up at the hospital, recounted that the two rooms on the first floor, which now mainly constitute the commemorative rooms, have not changed much since her father worked there, except for two display cases with papers and objects in the library/office.