The Finsen Light

Lawrence, Ghislaine

The Finsen Light

Resource type

Journal article

Creator (person)

Lawrence, Ghislaine

Date published

May 2002

Abstract

The climate and geography of a medical innovator's birthplace do not often explain the nature of their innovation, but in the case of Niels Ryberg Finsen (1860–1904), the link seems inescapable. Finsen was born in the Faeroe Islands, the son of Icelandic parents. Sickly for much of his childhood, he was dismissed from his Danish preparatory school for “small ability and total lack of energy”. Subsequently educated in Reykjavik, and then at the University of Copenhagen Medical School, Finsen won the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1903. Brought up in a land with unremitting winter months, he devoted his working life to studying the therapeutic potential of light. In 1896 Finsen established the first Medical Light Institute, in Copenhagen.