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Miss Jessen, the secretary of the Danish Council of Nurses, called at once and arranged a most delightful programme for every day of our stay in Copenhagen, bringing us invitations to see over the most important hospitals, and the Finsen Light Institute, the old Guildhall, the picture gallery, and anything else any of us wanted to see.
Finsen pointed out that where other methods of treatment such as painting the face with iodine or lunar caustic, or covering it with a mask or with fat, had met with any success in the past, the same principle was involved of protecting the skin from the light, though the practitioner did not know it. He was doing the thing they did in the middle ages, and calling them quacks.
Niels Ryberg Finsen, whose name I am sure you have heard because his scientific research gave us the "light-cure" which has been established at the London Hospital by our Queen Alexandra, who generously gave the costly apparatus required for the cure in order to benefit afflicted English people was born at Thorshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands.
Training for life there was not the heyday of youthful frolicking we sometimes associate with college life in our day and land. Not until he was thirty could he hang up his sheepskin as a physician. Yet the students had their fun and their sports, and Finsen was seldom missing where these went on.
They extend for two octaves above the violet of the spectrum and are too short to affect the eye as light, although they affect photographic plates. They are the friend of man when he uses them in moderation as Finsen did in the famous blue light treatment. But they tolerate no familiarity. To let them particularly the shorter of the rays enter the eye is to invite trouble.
The day before it our kind friend M. Thomsen brought us letters of introduction to Count Trampe, the Governor of Iceland, M. Picturssen, the bishop's suffragan, and M. Finsen, mayor of Rejkiavik. My uncle expressed his gratitude by tremendous compressions of both his hands.
The disease is, in fact, tuberculosis of the skin, and is the most dreadful of all the forms in which the white plague scourges mankind was, until one day Finsen announced to the world his second discovery, that lupus was cured by the simple application of light. It was not a conjecture, a theory, like the red-light treatment for smallpox; it was a fact.
Niels Ryberg Finsen was born in 1860 in the Faröe islands, where his father was an official under the Danish Government.
Finsen, sitting there with the seventy-five-year-old report from over the sea in his hand, it burst with a flood of light: the patients got well without scarring because they were in the dark. Red light or darkness, it was all the same. The point was that the chemical rays that could cause sunburn on men climbing glaciers, and had power to irritate the sick skin, were barred out.
Finsen had not heard of it, and was much interested. Evidently they had been groping toward the truth. How they came upon the idea is not the only mystery of that strange day, for they knew nothing of actinic rays or sunlight analyzed. But Finsen calmly invited the test, which was speedy in coming.
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