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,
#4051
Max Joseph von Pettenkofer
1818 - 1901 (83 years)
Max Joseph Pettenkofer, ennobled in 1883 as Max Joseph von Pettenkofer was a Bavarian chemist and hygienist. He is known for his work in practical hygiene, as an apostle of good water, fresh air and proper sewage disposal. He was further known as an anti-contagionist, a school of thought, named later on, that did not believe in the then novel concept that bacteria were the main cause of disease. In particular he argued in favor of a variety of conditions collectively contributing to the incidence of disease including: personal state of health, the fermentation of environmental ground water, and also the germ in question.
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Pierre Marie
1853 - 1940 (87 years)
Pierre Marie was a French neurologist and political journalist close to the SFIO. Medical career After finishing medical school, he served as an interne , working as an assistant to neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière and Bicêtre Hospitals in Paris. In 1883 he received his medical doctorate with a graduate thesis on Basedow’s disease, being promoted to médecin des hôpitaux several years later . In 1907 he attained the chair of pathological anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine, and in 1917 was appointed to the chair of neurology, a position he held until 1925. In 1911 Marie becam...
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Carl Wernicke
1848 - 1905 (57 years)
Carl Wernicke was a German physician, anatomist, psychiatrist and neuropathologist. He is known for his influential research into the pathological effects of specific forms of encephalopathy and also the study of receptive aphasia, both of which are commonly associated with Wernicke's name and referred to as Wernicke encephalopathy and Wernicke's aphasia, respectively. His research, along with that of Paul Broca, led to groundbreaking realizations of the localization of brain function, specifically in speech. As such, Wernicke's area has been named after the scientist.
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Dorothea Dix
1802 - 1887 (85 years)
Dorothea Lynde Dix was an American advocate on behalf of the indigent mentally ill who, through a vigorous and sustained program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums. During the Civil War, she served as a Superintendent of Army Nurses.
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Vladimir Bekhterev
1857 - 1927 (70 years)
Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev was a Russian neurologist and the father of objective psychology. He is best known for noting the role of the hippocampus in memory, his study of reflexes, and Bekhterev’s disease. Moreover, he is known for his competition with Ivan Pavlov regarding the study of conditioned reflexes.
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Otto Loewi
1873 - 1961 (88 years)
Otto Loewi was a German-born pharmacologist and psychobiologist who discovered the role of acetylcholine as an endogenous neurotransmitter. For this discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1936, which he shared with Sir Henry Dale, who was a lifelong friend that helped to inspire the neurotransmitter experiment. Loewi met Dale in 1902 when spending some months in Ernest Starling's laboratory at University College, London.
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Joseph Babinski
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Joseph Jules François Félix Babinski was a French-Polish professor of neurology. He is best known for his 1896 description of the Babinski sign, a pathological plantar reflex indicative of corticospinal tract damage.
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Hans Asperger
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Johann Friedrich Karl Asperger was an Austrian physician. Noted for his early studies on atypical neurology, specifically in children, he is the namesake of the autism spectrum disorder Asperger syndrome. He wrote more than 300 publications on psychological disorders that posthumously acquired international renown in the 1980s. His diagnosis of autism, which he termed "autistic psychopathy", also garnered controversy. Further controversy arose during the late 2010s over allegations that Asperger referred children to a Nazi German clinic responsible for murdering disabled patients, although hi...
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Henry Hallett Dale
1875 - 1968 (93 years)
Sir Henry Hallett Dale was an English pharmacologist and physiologist. For his study of acetylcholine as agent in the chemical transmission of nerve pulses he shared the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Otto Loewi.
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Franco Basaglia
1924 - 1980 (56 years)
Franco Basaglia was an Italian psychiatrist, neurologist, and professor, who proposed the dismantling of psychiatric hospitals, pioneer of the modern concept of mental health, Italian psychiatry reformer, figurehead and founder of Democratic Psychiatry, architect, and principal proponent of Law 180, which abolished mental hospitals in Italy. He is considered to be the most influential Italian psychiatrist of the 20th century.
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Hulusi Behçet
1889 - 1948 (59 years)
Hulusi Behçet , was a Turkish dermatologist and scientist. He described a disease of inflamed blood vessels in 1937, which is named after him as Behçet's disease. His portrait was depicted on a former Turkish postcard stamp.
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Wilhelm Heinrich Erb
1840 - 1921 (81 years)
Wilhelm Heinrich Erb was a German neurologist. He was born in Winnweiler, and died in Heidelberg. Academic career In 1864 he received his medical degree from the University of Heidelberg, where for several years he served as an assistant to pathologist Nikolaus Friedreich . As a young man, he also worked for a period of time under Ludwig von Buhl in Munich. In 1880 Erb attained the chair of special pathology at the University of Leipzig, where he was also appointed head of its policlinic. In 1883 he succeeded Friedreich at the University of Heidelberg, where he worked until his retirement in 1907.
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Alois Alzheimer
1864 - 1915 (51 years)
Alois Alzheimer was a German psychiatrist and neuropathologist and a colleague of Emil Kraepelin. Alzheimer is credited with identifying the first published case of "presenile dementia", which Kraepelin would later identify as Alzheimer's disease.
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Pedanius Dioscorides
40 - 90 (50 years)
Pedanius Dioscorides , "the father of pharmacognosy", was a Greek physician, pharmacologist, botanist, and author of —a 5-volume Greek encyclopedia about herbal medicine and related medicinal substances , that was widely read for more than 1,500 years. For almost two millennia Dioscorides was regarded as the most prominent writer on plants and plant drugs.
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Otfrid Foerster
1873 - 1941 (68 years)
Otfrid Foerster was a German neurologist and neurosurgeon, who made innovative contributions to neurology and neurosurgery, such as rhizotomy for the treatment of spasticity, anterolateral cordotomy for pain, the hyperventilation test for epilepsy, Foerster's syndrome, the first electrocorticogram of a brain tumor, and the first surgeries for epilepsy. He is also known as the first to describe the dermatomes , and he helped map the motor cortex of the cerebrum.
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Norman Bethune
1890 - 1939 (49 years)
Henry Norman Bethune was a Canadian thoracic surgeon, early advocate of socialized medicine, and member of the Communist Party of Canada. Bethune came to international prominence first for his service as a frontline trauma surgeon supporting the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War, and later supporting the Chinese Communist Party's Eighth Route Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Bethune helped bring modern medicine to rural China, treating both sick villagers and wounded soldiers.
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Victor Horsley
1857 - 1916 (59 years)
Sir Victor Alexander Haden Horsley was a British scientist and professor. He was born in Kensington, London. Educated at Cranbrook School, Kent, he studied medicine at University College London and in Berlin, Germany and, in the same year, started his career as a house surgeon and registrar at the University College Hospital. From 1884 to 1890, Horsley was Professor-Superintendent of the Brown Institute.
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John Addison Fordyce
1858 - 1925 (67 years)
John Addison Fordyce , was an American professor of dermatology, whose name is associated with Fordyce's spot, angiokeratoma of Fordyce, Brooke–Fordyce trichoepithelioma, and Fox–Fordyce disease.
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Charles R. Drew
1904 - 1950 (46 years)
Charles Richard Drew was an American surgeon and medical researcher. He researched in the field of blood transfusions, developing improved techniques for blood storage, and applied his expert knowledge to developing large-scale blood banks early in World War II. This allowed medics to save thousands of Allied forces' lives during the war. As the most prominent African American in the field, Drew protested against the practice of racial segregation in the donation of blood, as it lacked scientific foundation, and resigned his position with the American Red Cross, which maintained the policy un...
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Theobald Smith
1859 - 1938 (79 years)
Theobald Smith FRS HFRSE was a pioneering epidemiologist, bacteriologist, pathologist and professor. Smith is widely considered to be America's first internationally-significant medical research scientist.
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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 .
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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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