He finished his secondary education in 1849, and graduated from the
Royal Frederick University with the
cand.med. degree in 1856. He worked in
Christiania,
Kragerø and
Møre, before becoming a surgeon for army companies in
Stockholm (1857–1860) and Christiania (1862). He was hired at
Rikshospitalet in 1863; from 1867 to 1870 he was a
research fellow at the university (including thirteen months in the United States). He was a professor at the university and chief physician at Rikshospitalet, until retiring from both posts in 1908. His special field was surgery, but he was also a prominent scholar in
dentistry. He was the first in Norway to perform
ovarectomy (1866),
resection in the knee (1881) and resection in the bowel (1885). He also contributed significantly to the introduction of
antiseptic, later
aseptic methods in surgery. He chaired the
Norwegian Medical Society in 1880, received an
honorary degree at the
University of Copenhagen in 1879 and was a fellow in the
Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters from 1875. He was decorated as a Knight of the
Order of St. Olav in 1889; upgraded to Commander in 1897. ==References==