Holger Forchhammer

Holger Forchhammer (21 October 1866 – 19 May 1946) was a Danish senior physician, footballer, and football executive, who was the 2nd chairman of the Danish Sports Confederation (DIF) from 1897 to 1899. He was just 31 years old when he took office, thus being the youngest chairman of DIF to date. He became known for his great work to promote children and young people's access to sports.

Career as a physician

Forchhammer was born on 21 October 1866 as the son of Dr. Phil Johannes Forchhammer, a rector in the Aalborg University, later at Herlufsholm School, where he became a student of medicine in 1884, taking his master's degree in 1891. Forchhammer was a reserve doctor at Kysthospitalet in Refsnæs in 1893–94, and two years later, in 1896, he became the head of the medical consultation room of Denmark's first hospital in the present-day meaning of the word, the Frederiks Hospital. He was close friends with the doctor and Nobel Prize winner Niels Ryberg Finsen, and one of Finsen's closest collaborators in his first years, when he was struggling to gain resonance for his important ideas. He thus became a doctor at Finsen's Medical Light Institute in Copenhagen in 1898, where he was chief physician from 1899 to 1912. When Finsen become too weak to do anything, it was Forchhammer who, at the medical congress in Paris in 1900, struck the decisive blow for Finsen's light treatment.

Sporting career

In addition to being a physician, Forchhammer was also a sportsman, developing an interest in cricket and football in the 1880s, two sports that at the time were still practically unknown in the country.