Gerhard Armauer Hansen that the leprosy acts of 1877 and 1885 were passed, leading to a steady decline of the disease in Norway from 1,800 known cases in 1875 to just 575 cases in 1901. His distinguished work was recognized at the International Leprosy Congress held at Bergen in 1909. Hansen had suffered from syphilis since the 1860s but died of heart disease. He was an atheist. Gerhard Armauer Hansen Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen (29 July 1841 – 12 February 1912) was a Norwegian physician, remembered for his identification of the bacterium "Mycobacterium leprae" in 1873 as the causative agent of leprosy. Hansen
Scandinavian family name etymology and 2012. The general tendency over the past century has been to give up the commonest names and adopt less frequently-used ones. The most common Norwegian surnames were originally patronymic, commonly ending with the suffixes "-ssen", "-sson", "-sdatter", "-sdotter" which is the genitive s plus the word "sen" or "son" for son or "datter" or "dotter" for daughter. The genitive "s" was often dropped; compare Hanssen and Hansen. In 1923, it was ordered by law that each family should have a single, hereditary last name. Surnames derived from placenames commonly originated as farm names. Most families took a patronymic name,