The black skin of the negro was no longer
a mystery. It is his protection against the fierce sunlight of the
tropics and the injurious effect of its chemical ray.
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. There were so many
sick in the fort that, every available room being filled, they had
to put some of the patients into the bomb-proof, to great
inconvenience all round, as it was entirely dark there. The doctor
noted incidentally that, as if to make up for it, the underground
patients got well sooner and escaped pitting. To him it was a
curious incident, nothing more. Upon Dr. Finsen, sitting there with
the seventy-five-year-old report from over the sea in his hand, it
burst with a flood of light: the patients got well without scarring
_because_ they were in the dark. Red light or darkness, it was all
the same. The point was that the chemical rays that could cause
sunburn on men climbing glaciers, and had power to irritate the sick
skin, were barred out. Within a month he jolted the medical world by
announcing that smallpox patients treated under red light would
recover readily and without disfigurement.
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