PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: medicine
German scientist and philosopher
Hermann von Helmholtz was a German scientist and philosopher who made fundamental contributions to physiology, optics, electrodynamics, mathematics, and meteorology. He is best known for his statement...
English physician
William Harvey was an English physician who was the first to recognize the full circulation of the blood in the human body and to provide experiments and arguments to support this idea. Harvey had seven...
Persian philosopher and scientist
Avicenna was a Muslim physician, the most famous and influential of the philosopher-scientists of the medieval Islamic world. He was particularly noted for his contributions in the fields of Aristotelian...
German scientist
Rudolf Virchow was a German pathologist and statesman, one of the most prominent physicians of the 19th century. He pioneered the modern concept of pathological processes by his application of the cell...
Greek physician
Galen was a Greek physician, writer, and philosopher who exercised a dominant influence on medical theory and practice in Europe from the Middle Ages until the mid-17th century. His authority in the Byzantine...
German-Swiss physician
Paracelsus was a German-Swiss physician and alchemist who established the role of chemistry in medicine. He published Der grossen Wundartzney (Great Surgery Book) in 1536 and a clinical description of...
German bacteriologist
Robert Koch was a German physician and one of the founders of bacteriology. He discovered the anthrax disease cycle (1876) and the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis (1882) and cholera (1883). For his...
Jewish philosopher, scholar, and physician
Moses Maimonides was a Jewish philosopher, jurist, and physician, the foremost intellectual figure of medieval Judaism. His first major work, begun at age 23 and completed 10 years later, was a commentary...
Greek physician
Hippocrates was an ancient Greek physician who lived during Greece’s Classical period and is traditionally regarded as the father of medicine. It is difficult to isolate the facts of Hippocrates’ life...
British surgeon and medical scientist
Joseph Lister was a British surgeon and medical scientist who was the founder of antiseptic medicine and a pioneer in preventive medicine. While his method, based on the use of antiseptics, is no longer...
Italian physician and physicist
Luigi Galvani was an Italian physician and physicist who investigated the nature and effects of what he conceived to be electricity in animal tissue. His discoveries led to the invention of the voltaic...
English surgeon
Edward Jenner was an English surgeon and discoverer of a vaccine for smallpox. Jenner was born at a time when the patterns of British medical practice and education were undergoing gradual change. Slowly...
German chemist and physician
Georg Ernst Stahl was a German educator, chemist, and esteemed medical theorist and practitioner. His chemical theory of phlogiston dominated European chemistry until the “Chemical Revolution” at the end...
Italian scientist
Marcello Malpighi was an Italian physician and biologist who, in developing experimental methods to study living things, founded the science of microscopic anatomy. After Malpighi’s researches, microscopic...
German scholar and scientist
Georgius Agricola was a German scholar and scientist known as “the father of mineralogy.” While a highly educated classicist and humanist, well regarded by scholars of his own and later times, he was yet...
Canadian physician
Sir William Osler, Baronet was a Canadian physician and professor of medicine who practiced and taught in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain and whose book The Principles and Practice of Medicine...
British physician
Erasmus Darwin was a British physician, poet, and botanist noted for his republican politics and materialistic theory of evolution. Although today he is best known as the grandfather of naturalist Charles...
French physician
René Laënnec was a French physician who invented the stethoscope and perfected the art of auditory examination of the chest cavity. When Laënnec was five years old, his mother, Michelle Félicité Guesdon,...
American neurologist
Walter Jackson Freeman II was an American neurologist who, with American neurosurgeon James W. Watts, was responsible for introducing to the United States prefrontal lobotomy, an operation in which the...
Belgian physician
Andreas Vesalius was a Renaissance physician who revolutionized the study of biology and the practice of medicine by his careful description of the anatomy of the human body. Basing his observations on...
Belgian scientist
Jan Baptista van Helmont was a Flemish physician, philosopher, mystic, and chemist who recognized the existence of discrete gases and identified carbon dioxide. Van Helmont was born into a wealthy family...
Hungarian physician
Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician who discovered the cause of puerperal (childbed) fever and introduced antisepsis into medical practice. Educated at the universities of Pest and Vienna, Semmelweis...
Swiss physician and naturalist
Conrad Gesner was a Swiss physician and naturalist best known for his systematic compilations of information on animals and plants. Noting his learning ability at an early age, his father, an impecunious...
American pathologist and bacteriologist
Walter Reed was a U.S. Army pathologist and bacteriologist who led the experiments that proved that yellow fever is transmitted by the bite of a mosquito. The Walter Reed National Military Medical Center,...
Japanese physician
Hiroshi Nakajima was a Japanese physician and director general of the World Health Organization (WHO; 1988–98). Nakajima studied at Tokyo Medical College, where he received a doctorate in 1954. He then...
British physician
John Snow was an English physician known for his seminal studies of cholera and widely viewed as the father of contemporary epidemiology. His best-known studies include his investigation of London’s Broad...
American neurosurgeon and politician
Ben Carson is an American politician and neurosurgeon who performed the first successful separation of conjoined twins who were attached at the back of the head (occipital craniopagus twins). The operation,...
English physician
William Withering was an English physician best known for his use of extracts of foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) to treat dropsy (edema), a condition associated with heart failure and characterized by the...
British neurologist and writer
Oliver Sacks was a British neurologist and writer who won acclaim for his sympathetic case histories of patients with unusual neurological disorders. Sacks spent most of his childhood in London, though...
American neurosurgeon and medical correspondent
Sanjay Gupta is an American neurosurgeon and chief medical correspondent for CNN (Cable News Network). Gupta is best known for his captivating reports on health and medical topics, as well as his appearances...
British-born American physician and geneticist
Alexander Gordon Bearn was a British-born American physician and geneticist who discovered the hereditary nature of Wilson disease and established the basis for diagnostic tests and novel forms of treatment...
United States statesman and physician
Benjamin Rush was an American physician and political leader, a member of the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His encouragement of clinical research and instruction...
American physician
Helen Brooke Taussig was an American physician recognized as the founder of pediatric cardiology, best known for her contributions to the development of the first successful treatment of “blue baby” syndrome....
British American physician
Elizabeth Blackwell was an Anglo-American physician who is considered the first woman doctor of medicine in modern times. Elizabeth Blackwell was of a large, prosperous, and cultured family and was well...
American physician
Jack Kevorkian was an American physician who gained international attention through his assistance in the suicides of more than 100 patients, many of whom were terminally ill. Jack Kevorkian attended the...
Spanish theologian
Michael Servetus was a Spanish physician and theologian whose unorthodox teachings led to his condemnation as a heretic by both Protestants and Roman Catholics and to his execution by Calvinists from Geneva....
United States senator
Bill Frist is an American politician and physician who served as a U.S. senator (1995–2007) from Tennessee. A Republican, he was Senate majority leader from 2003 to 2007. Frist graduated from Princeton...
American physician and biologist
Robert J. Lefkowitz is an American physician and molecular biologist who demonstrated the existence of receptors—molecules that receive and transmit signals for cells. His research on the structure and...
American physician
Dean Ornish is an American physician and author whose approach to treating heart disease through radical diet modification and exercise generated significant debate in the medical community and attracted...
Alsatian-German theologian and physician
Albert Schweitzer was an Alsatian-German theologian, philosopher, organist, and mission doctor in equatorial Africa, who received the 1952 Nobel Prize for Peace for his efforts in behalf of “the Brotherhood...
American oncologist
Bert Vogelstein is an American oncologist known for his groundbreaking work on the genetics of cancer. Vogelstein was raised in Baltimore and attended a private middle school from which he was often truant,...
American relief worker and reformer
Annie Turner Wittenmyer was an American relief worker and reformer who helped supply medical aid and dietary assistance to army hospitals during the Civil War and was subsequently an influential organizer...
Scottish physician and professor
William Cullen was a Scottish physician and professor of medicine, best known for his innovative teaching methods. Cullen received his early education at Hamilton Grammar School, in the town where he was...
American businesswoman
Lydia E. Pinkham was a successful American patent-medicine proprietor who claimed that her Vegetable Compound could cure any “female complaint” from nervous prostration to a prolapsed uterus. Lydia Estes...
American physician
Sara Josephine Baker was an American physician who contributed significantly to public health and child welfare in the United States. Baker prepared at private schools for Vassar College, but the death...
American physician
Mary Putnam Jacobi was an American physician, writer, educator, and suffragist who is considered to have been the foremost woman doctor of her era. Mary Putnam was the daughter of George Palmer Putnam,...
American physician and government official
Regina Benjamin is an American physician who served as the 18th surgeon general of the United States (2009–13). Prior to her government appointment, she had spent most of her medical career serving poor...
American physician
William H. Masters was an American gynecologist who was a pioneer in the field of human sexuality research and sex therapy. With partner Virginia E. Johnson, Masters conducted groundbreaking research on...
American physician and reformer
Mary Edwards Walker was an American physician and reformer who is thought to have been the first female surgeon formally engaged for field duty during the Civil War. She is the only woman to receive the...
American physician
Andrew Weil is an American physician and popularizer of alternative and integrative medicine. Weil was the only child of parents who owned a millinery supply store. As a child, he developed a strong interest...
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