Publisert med forbehold om endringer under fremførelsen.

Dear friends,

I very rarely wear a tiepin. Today is an exception, however. And I’m wearing it in your honour. For it bears testimony to the significance of the work you do.

I doubt whether there’s a single person in this room who I’d be able to teach anything about lungs to.  Where lungs are concerned, I’m a typical user. Certainly not a connoisseur, let alone an expert.

So I’ve decided to opt for a personal angle by sharing my grandmother’s story with you. It’s about lungs … among other things.

My grandmother was exposed to the tragic side of life at an early stage. She married young; her husband was a seaman. During the First World War the ship he sailed on was torpedoed. Though he survived, he caught pneumonia, was sent to a hospital in England, and there contracted tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis took my grandmother to Lillehammer, where I live to this day. It took my grandmother to a house in Lillehammer, because it took her husband to the Mesnali tuberculosis sanatorium not far from the town.

My grandmother’s description of what it was like at Mesnali made a huge impression on me. Most people sent there knew full well that they’d been given a one-way ticket. Death’s unspoken anteroom.

Yet everyone did their very best while they waited for the inevitable. Red-letter days were celebrated, friendships were treasured. Patients and their nearest and dearest met round the bridge table, while the disease ran its course.

Slowly but surely one after another of the patients dropped out of the card games and left for the other ward. The ward people were sent to when fever set in and the end was approaching.

While the patients and their next-of-kin lived life to the best of their ability, the doctors fought a futile battle against the tuberculosis. Many of you here will know all too well how they must have felt.

I’m sure you also know the feeling of hope, a feeling we must never let go of. The doctors were forever trying out new methods, exposing their patients and themselves to trials and tribulations. But those who disappeared from the card tables never returned.

That was the fate that eventually befell the first owner of the tiepin I am wearing today. Both he and his wife, a couple in their early twenties, died at the Mesnali tuberculosis hospital. He first, then she – my grandmother’s friend – who gave her late husband’s tiepin to my grandmother when she was seized by the fever that was to be the end of her. She had no-one else to give it to.

These are the stories that really make their mark. So it’s with the profoundest respect that I am wearing this tiepin today. For me, it serves as a reminder of the cruelty of fate, and of how hope can run out even when the forces of good are on your side.

There’s another part of my grandmother’s story that has always made a deep impression on me. It’s about the time she met the sanatorium’s doctor at Lillehammer railway station. Rogstad was his name. On the day in question he was starting on a journey.

He was going to America, to learn about something new. In America they’d started experimenting with a new medicine by the name of penicillin. Rogstad came back to Mesnali with penicillin in his suitcase. And shortly afterwards the unthinkable happened: a patient – last seen in a fevered state on his way to the “other ward”– returned to the bridge table. And he was well!

A ticket to Mesnali was no longer a one-way ticket. The battle against tuberculosis had been won.

But there are plenty more battles to be fought on many other fronts, and antibiotics can’t help us to win them all. In the fight against COPD and lung cancer, other weapons are necessary.

The fight to rid humanity of disease and suffering is an ongoing battle, and I know that there are many in this room who stand in the forefront of that battle. For you, too, it’s often a case of having to recover from setbacks. But I hope you feel that you are moving forward – be it in small steps or large strides – along the road to a better life for all those patients whose destinies rest in your capable hands.

I am aware, for example, that you are going to celebrate a milestone during this conference: 25 years since the very first lung transplant was performed in the Nordic region. Just one of numerous examples that the efforts you make reap rewards in the end.

Those efforts that reap the greatest rewards are often the result of collaboration and of long-term work on many and varied fronts. Congresses such as this are recognition of that: the value of meetings between people with expertise, curiosity and the willingness to share, discuss and debate.

Dear Nordic friends,

It’s no secret that the Nordic is a subject close to my heart. Which is why it is an extra special pleasure and privilege to be asked to open the 47^th Nordic Lung Congress. 

You are carrying forth a long tradition. A source of progress in Nordic countries, Nordic culture and Nordic science for over 150 years. Not just in your own specialized fields, but in many others as well. We cannot just take for granted that the Nordic will continue to be a natural arena for such work, but I am convinced that it is an arena that is well worth protecting and nurturing. Purely and simply because it is fertile and it gives results.

Doctor Rogstad of Mesnali took part in at least one Nordic conference. In 1952 he spoke on the subject of “Lobar pulmonary consolidation in children with primary tuberculosis” at a conference that took place here in Oslo. To be honest, I don’t really know what he spoke about, but what I do know is that he benefited greatly from the comments and time spent together with good Nordic colleagues. Some things never change!

I’d like to close by wishing you all the best for a very successful and productive conference. In the meanwhile, I’ll wear my tiepin with pride in recognition of your vital work.

Thank you.