1904-5.] Nizis R. FINSEN—His LIFE AND WoRK. 129 
great discovery touching the treatment and cure of certain diseases by 
light alone should be given the world by a man who lived in Iceland until 
he was twenty-one, and knew through all his boyhood the depressing 
influence of too much night.”’ One of the first things Finsen said to him 
when he went to see him in Copenhagen was this, and he said it with touch- 
ing humility: ‘‘All that I have accomplished in my experiments with light 
and all that I have learned about its therapeutic value has come because 
I needed the light so much myself. I longed for it so.’’”* 
A writer in The Spectator already quoted draws our attention to the 
fact that, ‘‘He was only twenty-three when he found that his heart and 
liver were hopelessly diseased, and, as if that were not enough to crush his 
desire to work, he was attacked by dropsy. He was, it is said, actually 
‘tapped’ to relieve the dropsy more than thirty times. He had to 
realize, and realized with sheer bravery, that he could only keep himself 
alive by the strictest and most rigid discipline of diet. Every ounce of 
food and drink that he took was weighed,—for twenty years. Possibly 
in that time he lost—just possibly he never possessed—the desire to live 
naturally and joyously as most men live; but even if he never possessed 
such a desire—and there are some men who do not possess it—he as a 
student of medicine and biology, was always intimate with the possibilities 
and capabilities of a man’s body; and the amazing keenness of his intel- 
lect must have brought home to him a poignant sense of loss which a 
blunter mind perhaps, would not have been able to realize. Yet he déter- 
mined to live, not in the hope that life might bring him eventually 
freedom or partial relief from physical disability and grinding pain, but 
simply because, however painful life might be, the fact of being alive 
meant the ability to think.”’ 
This man who knew the very depths of suffering, would laugh at pain 
that would have rendered helpless many another. He even studied the 
diseases which he knew were to kill him some day; watched their progress; 
wrote articles on them for the medical papers, and on one occasion remarked 
with a humorous gleam in his eyes that he much regretted his inability 
to be present at his own post-mortem examination. A few weeks before 
the end, he sent a paper to the London Lancet, in which he maintained 
his unshaken confidence in the therapeutic value of the red light treatment 
of small-pox, stating that some who had recently had unfavorable results 
had not given the method a fa'r trial, in that all their patients were placed 
under treatment too late. This paper was published in November, 1904, 
after his death. 
Finsen’s home life was a very happy one, in spite of suffering. His 
* ‘*McClure’s Magazine.” 
