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.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Medical,
#4201
David M. Bosworth
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
David Marsh Bosworth was an American orthopedic surgeon and medical educator. He is remembered for describing the Bosworth fracture. Biography David Bosworth was born in New York City in 1897, the son of a minister. He attended the City College of New York and the University of Vermont, graduating B.A. cum laude in 1918. He studied medicine at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, member of Phi Chi Medical Fraternity, graduating cum laude in 1921, and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
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Regina Kapeller-Adler
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Regina Kapeller-Adler, born Regina Kapeller, was an Austrian biochemist who, in 1934, devised an innovative test for early pregnancy based on the detection of histidine in urine. As a Jew, she was forced to leave Austria following the country's annexation into Nazi Germany in the Anschluss and went to work with the noted geneticist Francis Crew at the Institute of Animal Genetics at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#4203
James Woodhouse
1770 - 1809 (39 years)
James Woodhouse was an American surgeon and chemist. Biography He was the son of English emigrants to the United States. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1787, and from its medical department in 1792. In 1791 he served as a surgeon in General Arthur St. Clair's expedition against the western Indians. When Joseph Priestley declined to accept the chair of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1795, Woodhouse received the appointment, which he held until his death.
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Clemens V. Rault
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Clemens Vincent Rault was a rear admiral in the United States Navy and dean of the Georgetown University School of Dentistry. He served as the Chief of the United States Navy Dental Corps twice, from 1932 to 1933 and again from 1948 to 1950.
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Kurt Singer
1885 - 1944 (59 years)
Kurt Singer was a German neurologist, musicologist, conductor and chairman of the Jüdischer Kulturbund. He was murdered in the Holocaust. Life Born in Kościerzyna, Singer, son of a rabbi, spent his youth in Koblenz. After graduating from high school he studied medicine, psychology and musicology. In 1908, he received his doctorate in medicine and initially worked as a neurologist at the Berlin Charité.
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Louise Stevens Bryant
1885 - 1956 (71 years)
Louise Stevens Bryant was an American public health specialist, writer, editor and publicist. She was especially involved in the fields of human sexuality and maternal health, and was the executive secretary of Robert Latou Dickinson's Committee on Maternal Health from 1927 to 1935.
Go to Profile#4207
Arthur Hutchinson
1889 - 1969 (80 years)
Arthur Cyril William Hutchinson FRSE was a British professor of dentistry. Life Hutchinson was born in Oldham on 26 July 1889, the son of Reverend William Roberts Hutchinson. He was raised in Oldham and educated at Oundle School. He studied dentistry at the University of Manchester, graduating with a BDS in 1911.
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John Murray
1775 - 1807 (32 years)
John Murray was a seaman and explorer of Australia. He was the first European to land in Port Phillip, the bay on which the cities of Melbourne and Geelong are situated. He is notable for his explorations and surveying work in Victoria and New South Wales, including being the first European captain to enter Port Phillip Bay, then known as Narrm-Narrm by the local Aboriginal people, and exploring the area around present-day Melbourne.
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Lucy Mabel Hall-Brown
1843 - 1907 (64 years)
Lucy M. Hall-Brown was an American physician and writer. She was a general practitioner and a physician at the Sherborn Reformatory for Women, now the Massachusetts Correctional Instituion – Framingham.
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Ivan Gevorkyan
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Ivan Khristoforovich Gevorkyan, born Hovannes Khachaturi Gevorkyan , was a Soviet Armenian surgeon and scientist who published 10 monographs and more than 230 scientific papers. His main research was dedicated to anesthesia, blood transfusion, the treatment of endarteritis of extremities and other surgical illnesses.
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Włodzimierz Godłowski
1900 - 1940 (40 years)
â Włodzimierz Józef Godłowski was a Polish neurologist and psychologist. A professor of the Stefan Batory University in Wilno , he was also an officer in the Polish Army during the German and Soviet invasion of Poland. He was made a prisoner of war by the Soviets in 1939 and was murdered in the 1940 Katyn massacre.
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Dietfried Müller-Hegemann
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Dietfried Müller-Hegemann was a German physician specialising in Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Neurology. Despite having joined the Communist Party in 1930, he was able to pursue his medical studies and career after 1933, becoming a military "staff doctor" when war broke out in 1939. Between 1944 and 1948 he was held as a prisoner of war by the Soviets. After that he was able to resume his medical career in the Soviet occupation zone / German Democratic Republic, achieving eminence both as a senior hospital physician and as a professor with the teaching chair in Psychiatry and Neurology at the prestigious Karl-Marx University in Leipzig.
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Lloyd Turton Price
1873 - 1933 (60 years)
Lloyd Turton Price FRCPE was a 20th-century Scottish surgeon who was professor of surgery at the University of St Andrews. Life He was born in Shrewsbury in 1873. He was educated at Oswestry School. He then studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh winning both the Lister Prize and the Crichton Research Scholarship. He graduated in 1901 with an MB ChB. In 1904 Price was awarded the Gunning Victoria Jubilee Prize for his essay, “Congenital stenosis of the pylorus”.
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Albrecht Wagner
1827 - 1871 (44 years)
Karl Ernst Albrecht Wagner was a German physician and surgeon. He studied medicine at the universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, receiving his doctorate in 1848 with the dissertation-thesis "De Spatulariarum anatome". He served as a military physician during the First Schleswig War, then in 1849–50 participated in a study tour to Paris and Vienna. Afterwards, he returned to Berlin as an assistant to surgeon Bernhard von Langenbeck. In 1852 he qualified as a lecturer, and during the following year was named a senior physician at the city hospital in Danzig.
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Birger Malling
1884 - 1989 (105 years)
Birger Malling was a Norwegian ophthalmologist and educator. He was born in Bergen as a son of district stipendiary magistrate Michael Vilhelm Malling and Marie Eleonora Henrichsen . From 1913 he was married to Helga Seeberg Tønnessen . He attended Bergen Cathedral School. He finished his secondary education in 1902 and graduated with the cand.med. degree in 1910, proceeding to take the dr.med. degree in 1919.
Go to Profile#4216
James Jamieson
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
James Dalgleish Hamilton Jamieson FRSE FDSE was a Scottish dentist and author. Life He was born on 10 September 1875 at 52 Rankeillor Street, a ground floor and basement flat in Edinburgh’s South Side, the son of Agnes Boyd and her husband, James Jamieson , a surgeon. He was educated at George Watsons College. He then studied dentistry at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1899.
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Robert William Johnstone
1879 - 1969 (90 years)
Robert William Johnstone CBE, FRCSEd, FRSE, FRCOG, was a Scottish obstetrician and gynaecologist. For some 20 years he was Professor of Midwifery and Gynaecology at the University of Edinburgh. He was a founding Fellow and subsequently vice-president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. He served as president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh from 1943 to 1945.
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Rob J. De Boer
#4219
Gordon Bell
1887 - 1970 (83 years)
Sir Francis Gordon Bell , FRCS, FRCSEd, FRACS was a New Zealand surgeon who was professor of surgery at the University of Otago at Dunedin. He was a founder member of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and was elected its president in 1947. In the 1953 Coronation Honours, Bell was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
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Alfred Boiffin
1856 - 1896 (40 years)
Alfred Boiffin was a French professor of clinical surgery at the University of Nantes in the 19th century. He died suddenly at age 39. Born of "a noble Breton family" in Nantes on 2 June 1856, Boiffin studied medicine at the University of Nantes, graduating in 1878. By 1880, he was a surgical clinic assistant at the university. He published several papers and presented many respected lectures at the Nantes Anatomical Society. Also spending time as an intern at the Nantes and Paris hospitals, he became an aide in the Anatomical Department in 1883 and later in 1886, he was a prosector at the ‘’Faculté de médicine de Paris’’.
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Sir John Fraser, 1st Baronet, of Tain
1885 - 1947 (62 years)
Sir John Fraser, 1st Baronet, was Regius Professor of Clinical Surgery at Edinburgh University from 1925 to 1944 and served as principal of the University of Edinburgh from 1944 to 1947. His study of tuberculosis in children was to disprove the view of the Nobel prize winner Robert Koch that bovine tuberculosis did not play a major pathogenic role in human disease. The subsequent legislation led to the elimination of tuberculosis from milk supplies and resulted in a decline in incidence of bone and joint tuberculosis in children. In 1940 he was the first surgeon in Britain to ligate an unin...
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Charles A. Hufnagel
1916 - 1989 (73 years)
Charles A. Hufnagel, M.D. was an American surgeon who invented the first artificial heart valve in the early 1950s. Hufnagel was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and reared in Richmond, Indiana. His father was also a surgeon. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame and earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. At Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, he began work on the heart and other organ transplants and explored the use of plastic to replace blood vessels, developing a technique called multi-point fixation, which would have great importance in the placement of the artificial aort...
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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
#4225
Wylie J. Dodds
#4226
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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L. M. Guttman Sokoloff
#4229
Julius Pohl
1861 - 1942 (81 years)
Julius Pohl was an Austrian-German pharmacologist. From 1879 to 1883 he studied medicine at the German University in Prague, where afterwards he worked as an assistant to Franz Hofmeister in the pharmacology institute. In 1892 he received his habilitation for pharmacology and pharmacognosy, and three years later became an associate professor. In 1897 he succeeded Hofmeister as chair of pharmacology at the university. In 1911 he relocated to the University of Breslau as successor to Wilhelm Filehne. In 1926 he became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
Go to Profile#4230
John Duncan
1839 - 1899 (60 years)
John Duncan, LLD FRCSEd FRSE was a Scottish surgeon best known for his surgical teaching at the University of Edinburgh and the Edinburgh Extramural School of Medicine. He was a pioneer of the use of electricity in surgery both for surgical cautery and for tumour necrosis. On the death of his father James Duncan in 1866 he became a director of the major drug manufacturer Duncan Flockhart & Co, which had been founded by his grandfather, also John Duncan . He served as President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh 1889 to 1891.
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Bernhard Pollack
1865 - 1928 (63 years)
Bernhard Pollack was a German neuroanatomist and ophthalmologist practicing in Berlin. He held the post of Professor of Ophthalmology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In addition to medical practice, he was a student of Moritz Moszkowski and a renowned pianist, having performed with Fritz Kreisler and with the violinist Joseph Szigeti.
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Albrecht Theodor Middeldorpf
1824 - 1868 (44 years)
Albrecht Theodor Middeldorpf was a German surgeon. He studied medicine at the universities of Breslau and Berlin, receiving his medical doctorate in 1846. As a student, his instructors included Jan Evangelista Purkyně, Johannes Peter Müller and Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach. Following graduation, he worked as assistant under Purkyně at Breslau for a year, then embarked on a study trip to Vienna and Paris. In 1853 he became an associate professor of surgery and ophthalmology at Breslau, and soon afterwards, was named head surgeon of the Allerheiligen-Hospital. In 1856 he became a full professor and director of the surgical-ophthalmologic clinic.
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Frank Lynn Iber
#4234
Peter Allebeck
#4235
Ken W. M.d. Heaton
#4236
Anton Gordonoff
1893 - 1966 (73 years)
Anton Gordonoff was a Swiss pharmacologist and toxicologist of Russian origin. Gordonoff studied pharmacology at the Universities of Bern and Nancy and finished his studies in 1921. In 1926 he received his habilitation from the University of Bern. Later the same university appointed him a professor of pharmacology and toxicology; he headed the Department of Pharmacology at the School of Medicine and was also a member of the Swiss Commission on Medicine and Drugs and of the Swiss Association for Clinical Neurophysiology.
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John Cabot
1450 - 1498 (48 years)
John Cabot was an Italian navigator and explorer. His 1497 voyage to the coast of North America under the commission of Henry VII, King of England is the earliest known European exploration of coastal North America since the Norse visits to Vinland in the eleventh century. To mark the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Cabot's expedition, both the Canadian and British governments declared Cape Bonavista, Newfoundland as representing Cabot's first landing site. However, alternative locations have also been proposed.
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Henry Miller
1913 - 1976 (63 years)
Henry George Miller was Vice-Chancellor of Newcastle University. Career Miller was born in Chesterfield, Derbyshire and studied medicine at Newcastle College of Medicine, now part of Newcastle University, from 1931 to 1937. Whilst there he served as secretary and president of the students' union. He spent time working at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, the Johns Hopkins Hospital in the United States and Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, before serving in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.
Go to Profile#4239
Myron Duker Jay S. Yanoff
#4240
Erhard Riecke
1869 - 1939 (70 years)
Rudolf Erhard Riecke was a German dermatologist and venereologist. He studied medicine at the universities of Munich and Halle, receiving his doctorate in 1895. In 1902 he obtained his habilitation for dermatology at the University of Leipzig, and in 1908 became an associate professor. From 1914 onward, he was a professor of dermatology at the University of Göttingen, where in 1932 he was named academic rector. In 1917 he was appointed director of the new university policlinic for skin and venereal diseases.
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Ragnvald Ingebrigtsen
1882 - 1975 (93 years)
Ragnvald Ingebrigtsen was a Norwegian physician who is regarded a pioneer in the development of surgery in Norway. He was born in Hammerfest, and was married to actress Gerd Egede-Nissen from 1922 to 1940, and to the sister of his first wife, Gøril Havrevold, from 1962. He graduated as cand.med. in 1907, and worked as a physician in Stavanger from 1908 to 1911. He then worked two years at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, where he studied neurosurgery, and further studied bacteriology and histology in Paris. He was appointed professor in surgery at the University of Oslo from 1928. ...
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Edwin Bramwell
1873 - 1952 (79 years)
Edwin Bramwell FRSE FRCPE was a Scottish neurologist. He was President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh from 1933 to 1935. Life He was born in North Shields on 11 January 1873 the son of Martha and Sir Byrom Bramwell. He was educated at Cheltenham College. He then studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh graduating MB ChB in 1896.
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Gil Yosipovitch
#4244
Sheldon H. Preskorn
#4245
Hermann Löhlein
1847 - 1910 (63 years)
Christian Adolf Hermann Löhlein was a German obstetrician and gynecologist. In 1870, he obtained his medical doctorate following studies at the universities of Jena and Berlin. Afterwards he spent several years at Berlin as an assistant in the clinic of Eduard Arnold Martin . From 1875 to 1888, he was a lecturer in obstetrics and gynecology in Berlin, followed by a professorship at the University of Giessen. Here he was successor to Max Hofmeier as chair of OB/GYN, becoming university rector in 1898. At Giessen he was also editor of the Gynäkologische Tagesfragen .
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Kenneth L. Melmon
#4247
Joseé E. Leysen
#4248
James Lawrence Cabell
1813 - 1889 (76 years)
Dr. James Lawrence Cabell was an American sanitarian and author. Life He was born in Nelson County, Virginia, the son of Dr. George Cabell, Jr., and graduated from the University of Virginia in 1833. He then studied medicine in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Paris, and became Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the University of Virginia, where he was chairman of the faculty in 1846 and 1847. Cabell was a full professor at the School of Medicine for 52 years and was an early pioneer of the sanitary preparation of the surgical patient following Lister's principles.
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Walter Burckhardt
1905 - 1971 (66 years)
Walter Burckhardt was a Swiss dermatologist most notable for his contributions on occupational dermatoses. During the 1930s, Burckhardt took over from Max Tièche the management of the City Department for Skin and Venereal Diseases in Zurich; he became Privatdozent in 1938 and Titularprofessor in 1947 at the University of Zurich.
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Albert Hilger
1839 - 1905 (66 years)
Albert Hilger was a German pharmacologist and chemist, known for his work in the field of food chemistry. He worked as a pharmacy assistant in the cities of Mannheim, Karlsruhe and Saarbrücken, and studied mathematics and sciences at the Polytechnic in Karlsruhe. In 1860 he continued his education at the University of Würzburg, receiving his PhD two years later in Heidelberg. Later on, he spent several years as an assistant to chemist Johann Joseph Scherer at Würzburg.
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