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Dansk

Fun facts about the faculty: Long live Health

This month, Aarhus University celebrated its 97th birthday. We started teaching 92 years ago. That's worth celebrating with a trip back to our younger days, back when we were called the Faculty of Medicine and the focus was very much on medical doctors. Did you know that…

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It all began with medical teaching in the university’s very first building (1340/41) in 1933, and two years later the Faculty of Medicine was officially constituted. Here are medical students engrossed in anatomy in 1942 in that very same building, with a view of the Park dormitories. After several name changes, relocations, and mergers, we are today the faculty of health sciences with the broader – but rather tricky-to-pronounce – name: Health. And what a fantastic journey it has been, as they say on X Factor. Photo: A.E. Andersen
  • … Icelandic Larus Einarson was the faculty’s first professor of anatomy? He was appointed on 1 August 1936. Incidentally, all of the faculty’s professors were men until 1985, when Eva Steiness became professor of clinical pharmacology – the very first female professor in the medical field in Denmark. But back to Einarson. Today, one of the buildings in the Anatomy complex bears his name, and it was he who in 1945 began the world’s largest collection of brains (10,000 in total) from deceased psychiatric patients, which until 2018 were stored at the psychiatric hospital in Risskov. They now reside at the University of Southern Denmark.
One of the Biomedicine buildings was named after Professor Einarson in 2019. And that probably wouldn’t have come as a surprise to the Icelandic professor, who was headhunted for his position in 1936. Legend has it that whenever Einarson was asked why he had never written a doctoral thesis and thus earned the title dr.med., he always replied: “Well, can you tell me who would have been capable of acting as opponents?” Photo: Arne Sell
  • … a six-square-metre room cost DKK 60 kroner a month to rent in 1954? But that price also included free electricity, cleaning, heating, and morning tea. Medical student Ib Andersen rented a tiny room on the first floor in the house of a widow in Tunøgade – a little space with one north-facing window and a radiator that was only installed some time after he moved in. He lived there throughout his studies, which later turned into a research career in – well, indoor climate and occupational health at the Hygienic Institute.
Ib Andersen rented a tiny chamber when he was enrolled as a medical student in the autumn of 1954. There was only room for a bed, a desk with a chair, and a small bookshelf. There was no space for a wardrobe or an armchair, but fortunately, there was a niche in the wall where he could store his clothes. Photo: Ib Andersen
  • … as many as 42% of the university’s total of 1,750 students were enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine in 1952? Today, Health’s students make up just under 13% of Aarhus University’s student population. When the faculty was first established in 1933, students could only take classes in the basic medical sciences – the rest had to be done in Copenhagen. Over the next 20 years, the medical degree programme was gradually expanded here, and finally, in 1953, students could also take their final exams in Aarhus – and thus become fully qualified doctors from Aarhus University.
February 1953. Medical students taking the first part of the medical degree exam – what today corresponds to the bachelor’s degree – dressed in suits, ties, and with high spirits outside the exam room. 106 students sat the first part of the exam in the winter of 1952/1953. 66 of them passed. Photo: Johannes Fossgreen.
Revised 27.02.2026
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Web team at Health