The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Medical,
#3951
Hippolyte Bernheim
1840 - 1919 (79 years)
Hippolyte Bernheim was a French physician and neurologist. He is chiefly known for his theory of suggestibility in relation to hypnotism. Life Born into a Jewish family, Bernheim received his education in his native town and at the University of Strasbourg, where he was graduated as doctor of medicine in 1867. The same year he became a lecturer at the university and established himself as a physician in the city.
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Guido Fanconi
1892 - 1979 (87 years)
Guido Fanconi was a Swiss pediatrician. He was born in Poschiavo, a small village in the Canton of Grisons. Fanconi is regarded as one of the founders of modern pediatrics. He received his secondary school education in Zurich. In 1911, he began his medical training in Lausanne. In 1920, he entered the Kinderspital of the University of Zurich, where, with the exception of one year, he remained for 45 years.
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Max Nonne
1861 - 1959 (98 years)
Max Nonne was a German neurologist. Biography Max Nonne received his early education at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums in Hamburg, and later studied medicine at the universities of Heidelberg, Freiburg, and Berlin, obtaining his doctorate in 1884. After graduation, he served as an assistant in the Heidelberg medical clinic under Wilhelm Heinrich Erb and in the surgical clinic in Kiel under Johannes Friedrich August von Esmarch , then in 1889 returned to Hamburg as a neurologist. During the same year, he became head physician in the department of internal medicine at the Red Cross Hospital.
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Mokutaro Kinoshita
1885 - 1945 (60 years)
Mokutarō Kinoshita was the pen-name of a Japanese author, dramaturge, poet, art historian and literary critic, as well as a licensed doctor specializing in dermatology during Taishō and early Shōwa period Japan. His other pen names included Horikason , Chikaisshakusei , Sounan and others. As professor of dermatology and a noted leprosy researcher, he served at four universities .
Go to Profile#3955
Hans Berger
1873 - 1941 (68 years)
Hans Berger was a German psychiatrist. He is best known as the inventor of electroencephalography in 1924, which is a method used for recording the electrical activity of the brain, commonly described in terms of brainwaves, and as the discoverer of the alpha wave rhythm which is a type of brainwave. Alpha waves have been eponymously referred to as the "Berger wave."
Go to Profile#3956
Gheorghe Marinescu
1863 - 1938 (75 years)
Gheorghe Marinescu was a Romanian neurologist, founder of the Romanian School of Neurology. History After attending the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Bucharest, Marinescu received most of his medical education as preparator at the laboratory of histology at the Brâncoveanu Hospital and as assistant at the Bacteriological Institute under Victor Babeș, who had already published several works on myelitis transversa, hysterical muteness, and dilatation of the pupil in pneumonia.
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Frederic Lewy
1885 - 1950 (65 years)
Fritz Heinrich Lewy , known in his later years as Frederic Henry Lewey, was a German-born American neurologist. He is best known for the discovery of Lewy bodies, which are a characteristic indicator of Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies.
Go to Profile#3958
Alexander Gettler
1883 - 1968 (85 years)
Alexander Oscar Gettler was a toxicologist with the Office of Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York between 1918 and 1959, and the first forensic chemist to be employed in this capacity by a U.S. city. His work at OCME with Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner, created the foundation for modern medicolegal investigation in the U.S. and Gettler has been described by peers as "the father of forensic toxicology in America."
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Allan G. Brodie
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Allan Gibson Brodie was an American dentist and orthodonist. An orthodontics teacher, writer, and researcher, Brodie served in a variety of professional positions, such as President of the Chicago Association of Orthodontics, served on advisory boards, achieved a number of professional awards, and was a member of the American Association of Orthodontists , where he established the Prize Essay Award to promote research.
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Ludwig Edinger
1855 - 1918 (63 years)
Ludwig Edinger was an influential German anatomist and neurologist and co-founder of the University of Frankfurt. In 1914 he was also appointed the first German professor of neurology. Edinger was born into a Jewish family and grew up in Worms, where his father was a successful textile salesman and democratic congressman in the state parliament of Hesse-Darmstadt. His mother was the daughter of a physician from Karlsruhe. He was not ashamed that he started his career as a poor man. Indeed, he proposed free schooling for all children in 1873, but without success.
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Ulf von Euler
1905 - 1983 (78 years)
Ulf Svante von Euler was a Swedish physiologist and pharmacologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1970 for his work on neurotransmitters. Life Ulf Svante von Euler-Chelpin was born in Stockholm, the son of two noted scientists, Hans von Euler-Chelpin, a professor of chemistry, and Astrid Cleve, a professor of botany and geology. His father was German and the recipient of Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1929, and his maternal grandfather was Per Teodor Cleve, Professor of Chemistry at the Uppsala University, and the discoverer of the chemical elements thulium and holmium.
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Leopold Freund
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
Leopold Freund was an Austrian-Jewish radiologist, considered the founder of medical radiology and radiotherapy. Leopold Freund was born in Miskovice in Central Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now part of the Czech Republic. He died in Brussels in 1943.
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John Jacob Abel
1857 - 1938 (81 years)
John Jacob Abel was an American biochemist and pharmacologist. He established the pharmacology department at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1893, and then became America's first full-time professor of pharmacology. During his time at Hopkins, he made several important medical advancements, especially in the field of hormone extraction. In addition to his laboratory work, he founded several significant scientific journals such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry and the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.
Go to Profile#3964
Doc Holliday
1851 - 1887 (36 years)
John Henry Holliday , better known as Doc Holliday, was a dentist and later a gambler, gunfighter, and a close friend and associate of lawman Wyatt Earp. Holliday is best known for his role in the events surrounding and his participation in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. He developed a reputation as having killed more than a dozen men in various altercations, but modern researchers have concluded that, contrary to popular myth-making, Holliday killed only one to three men. Holliday's colorful life and character have been depicted in many books and portrayed by well-know...
Go to Profile#3965
Rudolf Buchheim
1820 - 1879 (59 years)
Rudolf Buchheim was a German pharmacologist born in Bautzen . Rudolf Bucheim and his well-known student, chemist Oswald Schmiedeberg are considered to be the founders of modern pharmacology, with Bucheim sometimes described as the "Father of Pharmacology".
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Antoni Leśniowski
1867 - 1940 (73 years)
Antoni Leśniowski was a Polish surgeon, credited with publishing what may have been the earliest reports of the condition which later became known as Crohn's disease. He graduated in medicine from the University of Warsaw in 1890, and studied further in Berlin. From 1892 to 1912 he worked as a surgeon at the Infant Jesus Hospital in Warsaw, specialising in urology. Despite this, his most notable reports were on several cases of inflammatory bowel disease. On May 10, 1903, Medycyna, a weekly medical newspaper, published an article in which he described several cases of intestinal disease, conc...
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Martin Kirschner
1879 - 1942 (63 years)
Martin Kirschner was a German surgeon. Kirschner was born in Breslau, the son of Margarethe Kalbeck and Judge Martin Kirschner , who later served as city councillor of Breslau since 1873 and a member of the city parliament as of 1879. In 1892, he became burgomaster of Berlin and advanced to its Lord Mayor holding that office between 1899 and 1912.
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Paul Julius Möbius
1853 - 1907 (54 years)
Paul Julius Möbius was a German neurologist born in Leipzig. His grandfather was German mathematician and theoretical astronomer, August Ferdinand Möbius . Prior to entering the medical field in 1873, he studied philosophy and theology at the Universities of Leipzig, Jena and Marburg. After earning his medical doctorate in 1876, he enlisted in the army, attaining the rank of Oberstabsarzt . After leaving the army, he returned to Leipzig, where he opened a private practice and worked as an assistant to neurologist Adolph Strümpell at the university policlinic. In 1883 he obtained his habilita...
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Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal
1833 - 1890 (57 years)
Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal was a German psychiatrist from Berlin. He was the son of Otto Carl Friedrich Westphal and Karoline Friederike Heine and the father of Alexander Karl Otto Westphal . He was married to Klara, daughter of the banker Alexander Mendelssohn.
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Heinrich Braun
1862 - 1934 (72 years)
Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Braun was a German surgeon remembered for his work in the field of anaesthesiology. He was a native of Rawitsch, Province of Posen . Braun attended the Kreuzschule and the Vitzhumsches Gymnasium in Dresden, completing his Abitur in 1881. He studied medicine at the Universities of Strasbourg, Greifswald and Leipzig, earning his doctorate in 1887. From 1891 to 1905 he worked at various hospitals in Leipzig, becoming an associate professor at the University of Leipzig in 1905. The following year he was appointed chief surgeon and medical director of the Royal Saxonian Hospital in Zwickau, a position he maintained until his retirement in 1923.
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Robert Wartenberg
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Robert Wartenberg was a clinical neurologist and professor. Born in the then-Russian Empire, he attended university and established his career in Germany. As a Jew, he was fired from his position as the University of Freiburg's Clinical Department of Neurology during the Nazi regime. He immigrated to the US, settling in San Francisco and teaching at the University of California in San Francisco.
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René Leriche
1879 - 1955 (76 years)
Henri Marie René Leriche was a French vascular surgeon and physiologist. He was a specialist in pain, vascular surgery and the sympathetic trunk. He sensitized many who were mutilated in the first World war, he was the first to be interested in pain and to practice gentle surgery with as little trauma as possible.
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Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt
1885 - 1964 (79 years)
Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt was a German neurologist and neuropathologist. Although he is typically credited as the physician to first describe the Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, this has been disputed. He was born in Harburg an der Elbe and died in Munich.
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William Alanson White
1870 - 1937 (67 years)
William Alanson White was an American neurologist and psychiatrist. Biography He was born in Brooklyn, New York to parents Alanson White and Harriet Augusta Hawley White. He attended public school in Brooklyn. A young White was influenced by philosopher Herbert Spencer; After White's death, one writer recalled that White "was never seriously shaken from Spencer's hopeful evolutionary catechism, which at the age of 13 he had accepted as the key to all knowledge".
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Alfons Maria Jakob
1884 - 1931 (47 years)
Alfons Maria Jakob was a German neurologist who worked in the field of neuropathology. He was born in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria and educated in medicine at the universities of Munich, Berlin, and Strasbourg, where he received his doctorate in 1908. During the following year, he began clinical work under the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin and did laboratory work with Franz Nissl and Alois Alzheimer in Munich.
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Mathieu Orfila
1787 - 1853 (66 years)
Mathieu Joseph Bonaventure Orfila was a Spanish toxicologist and chemist, the founder of the science of toxicology. Role in forensic toxicology If there is reason to believe that a murder or attempted murder may have been committed using poison, a forensic toxicologist is often engaged to examine pieces of evidence such as corpses and food items for poison content. In Orfila's time the primary type of poison in use was arsenic, but there were not any reliable ways of testing for its presence. Orfila created new techniques, refined existing techniques and described them in his first treatise,...
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Korbinian Brodmann
1868 - 1918 (50 years)
Korbinian Brodmann was a German neuropsychiatrist who is known for mapping the cerebral cortex and defining 52 distinct regions, known as Brodmann areas, based on their cytoarchitectonic characteristics.
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Fatima Jinnah
1893 - 1967 (74 years)
Fatima Jinnah was a Pakistani politician and stateswoman. She was the younger sister of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder and the first governor-general of Pakistan. She was the Leader of the Opposition of Pakistan from 1960 until her death in 1967.
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Antoni Cieszyński
1882 - 1941 (59 years)
Antoni Cieszyński was a Polish physician, dentist and surgeon. Cieszyński was a professor and head of the Institute of Stomatology at Lviv University. He became the editor and publisher of Polska Dentystyka in 1930; the journal was renamed Polska Stomatologia and Słowiańska Stomatologia . Among his contributions to dentistry are the rules of isometry that allow for the bisecting angle to accurately reproduce dimensions in x-radiology, and extraoral anæsthetising techniques.
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Franz von Rinecker
1811 - 1883 (72 years)
Franz von Rinecker was a German pharmacologist and physician, born in Schesslitz near Bamberg. He studied medicine at Munich and Würzburg, earning his medical degree in 1834. In 1838 he became professor of pharmacology at the University of Würzburg. Some of his more prominent students and assistants were Emil Kraepelin, Franz von Leydig, Ernst Haeckel, Richard Geigel, Hermann Emminghaus and Carl Gerhardt, who later succeeded Rinecker at the department of pediatrics. In addition, he was responsible for the appointment of Albert von Kölliker and Rudolf Virchow to the medical faculty.
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Alfred Newton Richards
1876 - 1966 (90 years)
Alfred Newton Richards was an American pharmacologist. Richards, along with Wearn, is credited with the method of renal micropuncture to study the functioning of kidneys in 1924. Career Richards was born in Stamford, New York the son of Rev. Leonard E. Richards and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Burbank. He was educated at the Stamford Seminary and Union Free School. He then studied at Yale University.
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George T. Pack
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
George T. Pack was an American surgeon who specialized in the treatment of patients with cancer. Biography Pack was born on a farm in Antrim, Ohio. When he gave a lecture as a graduate student at Ohio State University, Dr. Winternitz of Yale University invited him to continue lecturing at the Yale Department of Pathology only to learn after his arrival that he was not even a medical student. He enrolled at Yale and graduated with a medical degree in 1922. In 1925 he became Professor of Pathology at the University of Alabama School of Medicine. In 1926 he went to New York to start as an intern at Memorial Cancer Center.
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Justus Christian Loder
1753 - 1832 (79 years)
Justus Ferdinand Christian Loder was a German anatomist and surgeon who was a native of Riga. Biography In 1777 Loder earned his medical doctorate at the University of Göttingen, and the following year was appointed professor of surgery and anatomy at the University of Jena, where he practiced medicine for the next 25 years. At Jena he was responsible for the establishment of an anatomical theatre and an Accouchierhaus . In 1780-81, at the expense of the Duke of Weimar, he took a scientific journey to France, England and Holland, a trip in which he made the acquaintance of several well-known ...
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Fedor Krause
1857 - 1937 (80 years)
Fedor Krause was a German neurosurgeon who was native of Friedland . Biography He originally studied music at the Conservatoire in Berlin, and later switched to medicine, earning his doctorate at Humboldt University in Berlin. In 1883 he became a medical assistant to Richard von Volkmann at the surgical university clinic at Halle. Afterwards, he was a pathologist at the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt am Main , a surgeon at the city hospital at Hamburg-Altona , and later head of the surgical department at Augusta Hospital in Berlin. In 1901 he became an associate professor at the University of Berlin.
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Nathan Cooley Keep
1800 - 1875 (75 years)
Nathan Cooley Keep was a pioneer in the field of dentistry, and the founding Dean of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Biography Keep was born in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, on December 23, 1800. Adept with his hands, he became interested in dentistry following an apprenticeship with a local jeweler. In 1821, he moved to Boston and graduated from Harvard Medical School with an M.D. in 1827. He practiced dentistry for 40 years, was hailed for his proficiency, and in 1843 was awarded an honorary D.D.S. by the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery. Keep invented and manufactured many dental tools and is credited with being one of the first to manufacture porcelain teeth.
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Gabriel Anton
1858 - 1933 (75 years)
Gabriel Anton was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He is primarily remembered for his studies of psychiatric conditions arising from damage to the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia. Academic career He was a native of Saaz, Bohemia, and in 1882 received his medical doctorate at Prague. In 1887 he traveled to Vienna in order to work with Theodor Meynert , who was to become an important influence to Anton's medical career. In 1891 he moved to Innsbruck, where he served as an associate professor of psychiatry and director of the university clinic. Later , he relocated to the Universi...
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Karl-Axel Ekbom
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Karl-Axel Ekbom was a Swedish neurologist. He is mostly known for his detailed description of restless legs syndrome . Ekbom started his medical studies in Stockholm in 1928 and was licensed in 1934. He received the Doctor of Medicine degree in 1945. After working at the Karolinska Institute from 1945 to 1958, he became Professor of Neurology at the University of Uppsala where he worked until 1974.
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Adam Gruca
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Adam Gruca was a famous Polish orthopaedist, inventor, and surgeon. He is considered to be the founder of modern orthopedic surgery in Poland. Gruca also invented various orthopaedic instruments and appliances.
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Jean Lhermitte
1877 - 1959 (82 years)
Jacques Jean Lhermitte was a French neurologist and neuropsychiatrist. Early life and education Lhermitte was born in Mont-Saint-Père, Aisne, son of Léon Augustin Lhermitte, a French realist painter. Following his early education at Saint-Etienne, he studied in Paris and graduated in medicine in 1907. He specialised in neurology and became Chef-de-clinique for nervous diseases in 1908, Chef de laboratoire in 1910, and professeur agrégé for psychiatry 1922.
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Stewart Duke-Elder
1898 - 1978 (80 years)
Sir William Stewart Duke-Elder was a Scottish ophthalmologist, a dominant force in his field for more than a quarter of a century. Life Duke-Elder was born in the manse in Tealing near Dundee. His father, Rev Neil Stewart Elder, was the village minister of the Free Church of Scotland. His mother was Isabelle Duke, daughter of Rev John Duke of the Free Church in Campsie, Stirlingshire.
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Franz König
1832 - 1910 (78 years)
Franz König was a German surgeon. The son of a physician, he was born in Rotenburg an der Fulda. In 1855 he received his doctorate from the University of Marburg, and was later district wound surgeon in Hanau. Afterwards he was a professor of surgery at the universities of Rostock and Göttingen , and eventually at the Charité-Berlin, where in 1895 he succeeded Heinrich Adolf von Bardeleben. In 1904 he was succeeded at the Charité by Otto Hildebrand.
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Theodor Meynert
1833 - 1892 (59 years)
Theodor Hermann Meynert was a German-Austrian psychiatrist, neuropathologist, and anatomist born in Dresden. Meynert believed that disturbances in brain development could be a predisposition for psychiatric illness and that certain psychoses are reversible.
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Jules François
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Émile Jules Marie Joseph François was a Belgian ophthalmologist. Biography François received his medical degree at the Catholic University of Louvain in 1930 and specialized in ophthalmology and ophthalmic surgery. He went into private practice in ophthalmology in Charleroi. He remained active there as a scientific researcher and in 1942 became a professor at Ghent University and the director of Ghent University's eye clinic.
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Hans Gustav Wilhelm Steinert
1875 - 1911 (36 years)
Hans Gustav Wilhelm Steinert was a German neurologist best known for publishing the first description of myotonic dystrophy. Early life and career Steinert was born in Dresden to Otto Steinert, a lawyer, and his wife Louise. From 1893 Steinert studied philosophy and medicine at the Universities of Leipzig, Freiburg, Berlin and Kiel, qualifying as a doctor in 1898.
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Derek Denny-Brown
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Derek Ernest Denny-Brown OBE was a New Zealand-born neurologist. Working in Oxford, London and Boston, he made major contributions to the field of neurology, such as the development of electromyography, physiology of micturition and the treatment of Wilson's disease.
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Ernst Remak
1849 - 1911 (62 years)
Ernst Julius Remak was a German neurologist who was the son of famed neurologist Robert Remak and the father of the mathematician Robert Remak . He received his education at the Universities of Breslau, Berlin, Würzburg, Strasbourg and Heidelberg, and obtained the degree of M.D. in 1870. At Heidelberg, he was a student of neurologist Wilhelm Heinrich Erb . Afterwards he took part in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. After serving as assistant in the department for nervous diseases at the Charité Hospital, Berlin from 1873 to 1875, he established himself as a neurologist in the German capit...
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Christopher John Bulpitt
#3998
Wylie J. Dodds
#3999
Adolf Strümpell
1853 - 1925 (72 years)
Ernst Adolf Gustav Gottfried Strümpell, from 1893 von Strümpell , was a Baltic German neurologist. Life Strümpell was born in Neu-Autz, Courland , the son of the philosopher Ludwig Strümpell . After study in Dorpat and Leipzig, in 1875 he received his medical doctorate from the University of Leipzig, where he had as instructors Carl Wunderlich , Karl Thiersch and Carl Ludwig . In 1883 he was an associate professor at Leipzig, and from 1886 to 1903 was a full professor at the University of Erlangen, succeeding Wilhelm Olivier Leube as director of the medical clinic. Afterwards he was a profes...
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Robin Fåhræus
1888 - 1968 (80 years)
Robert Sanno Fåhræus, born 15 October 1888 in Stockholm, died 18 September 1968 in Lund, was a Swedish medical researcher noted for his contributions to hemorheology. Biography Fåhræus was the son of art historian Klas Fåhraeus and actress Olga Björkegren. He commenced studies at Karolinska Institute in 1908, where he received his medical license in 1922. Before that, in 1921, he had completed his research doctorate with the title The suspension-stability of the blood. He became associate professor of experimental pathology at the Karolinska Institute in 1922. He was professor of pathology at...
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