# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/niels-ryberg-finsen
# Generated: 2026-08-31T17:47:34.938Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/niels-ryberg-finsen"
name: "Niels Ryberg Finsen"
slug: "niels-ryberg-finsen"
description: "He proved that light could heal flesh. Finsen won the 1903 Nobel Prize for using concentrated light radiation to treat lupus vulgaris, cracking open phototherapy as a medical field when most still thought sunshine was just pleasant."
tagline: "Faroese physician and scientist of Icelandic descent"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Niels_Ryberg_Finsen_portrait.jpg"
gender: "male"
category:
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  slug: "doctors"
profileType:
  name: "Doctor"
  slug: "doctor"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1860-12-15"
deathDate: "1904-09-24"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           57.64
  momentum:             2.230483271375465
  historical:           22.08514
  currentAttention:     12.39157372986369
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  60
  trendDirection:       "STABLE"
ranks:
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  country:  null
  category: 103
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  - name: "Medicine"
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  - name: "Science"
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  - name: "19th Century"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Niels Ryberg Finsen was born on 15 December 1860, trained as a physician, and turned his attention to what light could do to living tissue. His work centered on concentrated light radiation—focused, deliberate exposure—and its effect on lupus vulgaris, a disfiguring tuberculosis of the skin that had resisted most treatments. The method worked. In 1903, the Nobel committee awarded him the prize in Medicine and Physiology for opening a new avenue in medical science, one that hadn't existed before he aimed the beam. He died the following year, 24 September 1904, forty-three years old.