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Updated: June 28, 2025
Finsen wanted to know what it was in the sunlight that had this power, and how we could borrow it and turn it to use. The men of science had long before analyzed the sunlight. They had broken it up into the rays of different color that together make the white light we see.
It is strange but true that Dr. Finsen had never seen a smallpox patient at that time, but he knew the nature of the disease, and that the sufferer was affected by its eruption first and worst on the face and hands that is to say, on the parts of the body exposed to the light and he was as sure of his ground as was Leverrier when, fifty years before, he bade his fellow astronomers look in a particular spot of the heavens for an unknown planet that disturbed the movements of Uranus.
My uncle was just as courteously received by the mayor, M. Finsen, whose appearance was as military, and disposition and office as pacific, as the Governor's. As for the bishop's suffragan, M. Picturssen, he was at that moment engaged on an episcopal visitation in the north. For the time we must be resigned to wait for the honour of being presented to him.
Finsen watched the shadow rout her out again and again. It was clear that the cat liked the sunlight. A few days later he stood upon a bridge and saw a little squad of insects sporting on the water. They drifted down happily with the stream till they came within the shadow of the bridge, when they at once began to work their way up a piece to get a fresh start for a sunlight sail.
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.
On one of his days of extreme prostration the dowager empress of Russia knocked vainly at his door. She pleaded so hard to be allowed to see Dr. Finsen that they relented at last, and she sat by his bed and wept in sympathy with his sufferings, while he with his brave smile on lips that would twitch with pain did his best to comfort her.
My uncle was most graciously received by M. Finsen, the mayor, who as far as costume went, was quite as military as the governor, but also from character and occupation quite as pacific. As for his coadjutor, M. Pictursson, he was absent on an episcopal visit to the northern portion of the diocese. We were therefore compelled to defer the pleasure of being presented to him.
Searching the libraries in Copenhagen for the records of earlier explorers in his field, and finding little enough there, Finsen came across the report of an American army surgeon on a smallpox epidemic in the South in the thirties of the last century.
Finsen was given the Nobel prize partly for re-discovery of this. They segregated erysipelas and so prevented its spread. They recognized the contagiousness of leprosy, and though it was probably as widespread as tuberculosis is at the present time, they succeeded not only in controlling but in eventually obliterating it throughout Europe.
They came in gloom and misery; they went away carrying in their faces the sunshine that gave them back their life. Finsen never tired, when showing friends over his Institute, of pointing out the joyous happiness of his patients. It was his reward. For not "science for science's sake," or pride in his achievement, was his aim and thought, but just the wish to do good where he could.
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