? i ca 
1904-5.] Niets R. FINsEN—His LIFE AND WORK. 127 
His father was domain judge, and was descended from an old Icelandic 
family, hence some of Finsen’s early years were passed at school in Reyk- 
javic, the capital of Iceland, where he remained until his twenty-first year, 
passing his student examinations there. He then entered the University 
of Copenhagen in Denmark, at which he remained for eight years, graduat- 
ing as Doctor of Medicine in 1890 at the age of thirty. As a student, he 
lived in the famous old Copenhagen Home for Students, the Regensen, 
the Collegium regium, built by Christian IV. 
It is related of him that even as a young student he evinced that love 
of true freedom which became such a characteristic feature in the man. 
“It was at the time when the policy of the Estrum Government roused 
the ire and the wrath of its opponents to a degree rarely seen in Denmark. 
In some places the peasantry refused to pay their taxes, thereby incurring 
certain personal inconveniences, for which their sympathisers tried to 
recompense them by hailing them asa kind of martyrs. Some of these men 
had come to Copenhagen, and Finsen and his Contubernal (the student 
who shared his room), thought the Regensen ought to honour these cham- 
pions of the good cause in some way. They knew, however, that the 
master of the College, the ‘‘Regensprovst’’—dean—as he is called, was 
distinctly adverse to this kind of demonstration, but his permission was 
necessary, so they innocently asked his leave to entertain a few friends 
from the country, and it was readily given. The next day the worthy dean 
was much surprised at seeing paragraphs in the papers about a party of 
‘‘Shattenagtere’’ (tax refusers) having been entertained at the Regensen 
with his, the dean’s permission. Finsen naturally was jubilant.’’* 
It is said that from the standpoint of examinations, (a most fallacious 
standard often) he was only moderately successful as a student, graduating 
in the second class. This was perhaps largely due to his attention having 
been already directed very specially to the influence of light upon living 
organisms; ascribed to the observation that he was able to work better 
in the well-lighted room of a fellow-student than in his own. He knew 
that he felt less well when, for a time, he occupied a room facing the 
north.{ Wihle yet a student he had begun those investigations and ex- 
periments that were destined to make him famous, and at the same time 
his inventive genius found scope in devising an improved breech-loading 
gun, cool summer houses, a new cooking apparatus, and later a variety of 
hematine lozenges. The investigations started in a small attic of the 
old Surgical College building. Sophus Bang, a fellow-student, believed 
with him that a complete revolution in therapeutics was necessary. Both 
became ill, and while Bang went to Switzerland to strive to regain health, 
* Broéchner ‘Pall Mall Magazine.’ 
+ ‘‘ Lancet.’ London. { ‘* Pall Mall.” 
