Den kombinerede Indretning

Den kombinerede Indretning (The Combined Arrangement) began as a museum of nursing, hospitals and medicine. Its collection of objects from medical history was amassed by a museum-supporter group with the same name. After its establishment in 1989, the group opened an exhibition in 1995 in the laundry building of the former Rogaland County Hospital. The exhibition presented medical equipment and other health-related objects from ca. 1850 to recent times, also furniture, books, uniforms and archival material. In the exhibition one could see environments such as a room where patients stayed, a doctor’s office, operating room, laboratory, nursing classroom and home-birth situation.

In the 1800s, the name ‘Den kombinerede Indretning’ designated an institution in Stavanger where convicts and poor people who were sick lived in the same building complex. This institution, which was established in 1845, was shut down in 1897, partly through a vigorous initiative by the local author Alexander Kielland.

In 2006, in connection with a national museum reform, the museum Den kombinerede Indretning became part of the consolidated Museum Stavanger (MUST). In anticipation of new premises, its medical history exhibition was dismantled in 2008. Parts of the collection, however, are on show in Stavanger Museum’s exhibition The Miracle of Life, which is about pregnancy, birth and midwifery.