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.
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. And they found the one we call Neptune
there.
Presently all the world knew that the first definite step had been
taken toward harnessing in the service of man the strange force
in the sunlight that had been the object of so much speculation
and conjecture. The next step followed naturally. In the published
account of his early experiments Finsen foreshadows it in the
words, “That the beginning has been made with the hurtful effects
of this force is odd enough, since without doubt its beneficial
effect is far greater.” His clear head had already asked the
question: if the blue rays of the sun can penetrate deep enough
into the skin to cause injury, why should they not be made to do
police duty there, and catch and kill offending germs—in short, to
heal?
Finsen had demonstrated the correctness of the theory that the
chemical rays have power to kill germs. But it happens that these
are the rays that possess the least penetration. How to make
them go deeper was the problem. By an experiment that is, in its
simplicity, wholly characteristic of the man, he demonstrated that
the red blood in the deeper layers of the skin was the obstacle. He
placed a piece of photographic paper behind the lobe of his wife’s
ears and concentrated powerful blue rays on the other side. Five
minutes of exposure made no impression on the paper; it remained
white. But when he squeezed all the blood out of the lobe, by
pressing it between two pieces of glass, the paper was blackened in
twenty seconds.
That night Finsen knew that he had within his grasp that which
would make him a rich man if he so chose. He had only to construct
apparatus to condense the chemical rays and double their power
many times, and to apply his discovery in medical practice. Wealth
and fame would come quickly. He told the writer in his own simple
way how he talked it over with his wife. They were poor. Finsen’s
salary as a teacher at the university was something like $1200 a
year. He was a sick man, and wealth would buy leisure and luxury.
Children were growing up about them who needed care. They talked it
out together, and resolutely turned their backs upon it all. Hand
in hand they faced the world with their sacrifice. What remained of
life to him was to be devoted to suffering mankind. That duty done,
what came they would meet together. Wealth never came, but fame in
full measure, and the love and gratitude of their fellow-men.
There is a loathsome disease called lupus, of which, happily, in
America with our bright skies we know little. Lupus is the Latin
word for wolf, and the ravenous ailment is fitly named, for it
attacks by preference the face, and gnaws at the features, at nose,
chin, or eye, with horrible, torturing persistence, killing slowly,
while the patient shuts himself out from the world praying daily
for death to end his misery.
In the north of Europe it is sadly common, and there had never been
any cure for it. Ointments, burning, surgery—they were all equally
useless. Once the wolf had buried its fangs in its victim, he was
doomed to inevitable death. 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. For two years he had been sending people
away whole and happy who came to him in despair. The wolf was
slain, and by this silent sufferer whose modest establishment was
all contained within a couple of small shanties in a corner of the
city hospital grounds, at Copenhagen.
There was a pause of amazed incredulity. The scientific men did
not believe it. Three years later, when the physician in charge
of Finsen’s clinic told at the medical congress in Paris of the
results obtained at the Light Institute, his story was still
received with a polite smile. The smile became astonishment when,
at a sign from him, the door opened and twelve healed lupus
patients came in, each carrying a photograph of himself as he was
before he underwent the treatment. Still the doctors could not
grasp it. The thing was too simple as matched against all their
futile skill.
But the people did not doubt. There was a rush from all over Europe
to Copenhagen. Its streets became filled with men and women whose
faces were shrouded in heavy bandages, and it was easy to tell
the new-comers from those who had seen “the professor.” 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. Then, in
three more years, they awarded him the great Nobel prize for signal
service to humanity, and criticism was silenced. All the world
applauded.
“They gave it to me this year,” said Finsen, with his sad little
smile, “because they knew that next year it would have been too
late.” And he prophesied truly. He died nine months later.
All that is here set down seems simple enough. But it was
achieved with infinite toil and patience, by the most painstaking
experiments, many times repeated to make sure. In his method of
working Finsen was eminently conservative and thorough. Nothing
“happened” with him. There was ever behind his doings a definite
purpose for which he sought a way, and the higher the obstacles
piled up the more resolutely he set his teeth and kept right on.
“The thing is not in itself so difficult,” he said, when making
ready for his war upon the wolf, “but the road is long and the
experiments many before we find the right way.”
He took no new step before he had planted his foot firmly in the
one that went before; but once he knew where he stood, he did not
hesitate to question any scientific dogma that opposed him, always
in his own quiet way, backed by irrefutable facts. In a remarkable
degree he had the faculty of getting down through the husk to the
core of things, but he rejected nothing untried. The little thing
in hand, he ever insisted, if faithfully done might hold the key
to the whole problem; only let it be done _now_ to get the matter
settled.
Whatever his mind touched it made perfectly clear, if it was not
so already. As a teacher of anatomy he invented a dissecting knife
that was an improvement on those in use, and clamps for securing
the edges of a wound in an operation. As a rifle shot he made an
improved breech; as a physician, observing the progress of his
own disease, an effective blood powder for anaemia. At the Light
Institute, which friends built for him, and the government endowed,
he devised the powerful electric lamps to which he turned in
the treatment of lupus, for the sun does not shine every day in
Copenhagen; and when it did not, the lenses that gathered the blue
rays and concentrated them upon the swollen faces were idle. And
gradually he increased their power, checking the heat rays that
would slip through and threatened to scorch the patient’s skin, by
cunning devices of cooling streams trickling through the tubes and
the hollow lenses.
Nothing was patented; it was all given freely to the world. The
decision which he and his wife made together was made once for
all. When the great Nobel prize was given to him he turned it over
to the Light Institute, and was with difficulty persuaded to keep
half of it for himself only when friends raised an equal amount and
presented it to the Institute.
Finsen knew that his discoveries were but the first groping steps
upon a new road that stretched farther ahead than any man now
living can see. He was content to have broken the way. His faith
was unshaken in the ultimate treatment of the whole organism under
electric light that, by concentrating the chemical rays, would
impart to the body their life-giving power. He himself was beyond
their help. Daily he felt life slipping from him, but no word of
complaint passed his lips. He prescribed for himself a treatment
that, if anything, was worse than the disease. Only a man of iron
will could have carried it through.
A set of scales stood on the table before him, and for years he
weighed every mouthful of food he ate. He suffered tortures from
thirst because he would allow no fluid to pass his lips, on account
of his tendency to dropsy. Through it all he cheerfully kept up his
labors, rejoicing that he was allowed to do so much. His courage
was indomitable; his optimism under it all unwavering. His favorite
contention was that there is nothing in the world that is not good
for something, except war. That he hated, and his satire on the
militarism of Europe as its supreme folly was sharp and biting.
Of such quality was this extraordinary man of whom half the world
was talking while the fewest, even in his own home city, ever saw
him. Fewer still knew him well. It suited his temper and native
modesty, as it did the state of his bodily health, to keep himself
secluded. His motto was: “_bene vixit qui bene latuit_—he has
lived well who has kept himself well hidden”—and his contention
was always that in proportion as one could keep himself in the
background his cause prospered, if it was a good cause. When kings
and queens came visiting, he could not always keep in hiding,
though he often tried. 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. She and Queen Alexandra,
both daughters of King Christian, carried the gospel of hope and
healing from his study to their own lands, and Light Institutes
sprang up all over Europe.
In his own life he treated nearly nineteen hundred sufferers,
two-thirds of them lupus patients, and scarce a handful went from
his door unhelped. When his work was done he fell asleep with
a smile upon his lips, and the “universal judgment was one of
universal thanksgiving that he had lived.” He was forty-three years
old.
When the news of his death reached the Rigsdag, the Danish
parliament, it voted his widow a pension such as had been given to
few Danes in any day. The king, his sons and daughters, and, as it
seemed, the whole people followed his body to the grave. The rock
from his native island marks the place where he lies. His work is
his imperishable monument. His epitaph he wrote himself in the
speech another read when the Nobel prize was awarded him, for he
was then too ill to speak.
“May the Light Institute grasp the obligation that comes with its
success, the obligation to maintain what I account the highest aim
in science—truth, faithful work, and sound criticism.”
Footnotes:
[15] The autopsy which he himself ordered on his death-bed as his
last contribution to medical knowledge, showed it to be a slow
ossification of the membrane of the heart, involving the liver and
all the vital organs. He was “tapped” for dropsy more than twenty
times.
Printed in the United States of America.