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The medical faculty at the royal Frederik’s University (later the University of Oslo) was established in 1814 with a combined education of medicine and surgery. This made the Norwegian medical education quite unique at the time, and the university played a main role in uniting medicine and surgery into one profession. In other European countries, medical/surgical education in universities emerged later, mainly because academic schools for surgical education already existed and because both the medical and surgical elites were reluctant to let their professions fuse into a unity. However, from the late 1700s, a unified education seemed rational for several reasons. The surgical education had become scientific; the medical elites had accepted the surgeons’ clinical-anatomical approach to disease; and Enlightenment ideas favoured a utilitarian education of doctors that could serve the society’s need of a more practical, i.e. more surgical medicine. These factors became influential in Norway at the beginning of the 19th century, when the country’s first medical education was to be built from scratch. The fact there were more positions for surgeons than medical doctors was also important, so a school merely for medical subjects other than surgery was not feasible.

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