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,
#4401
Brian Gilmore Maegraith
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Brian Gilmore Maegraith was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1907 and went to Britain in 1931 to take up the South Australian Rhodes Scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford. He served in France and Sierra Leone as a pathologist in the Royal Army Medical Corps, led the Malaria Research Unit at Oxford, held the Deanship of Faculty of Medicine at Oxford, and was appointed to the Chair of Tropical Medicine at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in 1944. He died in England in 1989.
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Alexander Burns Wallace
1906 - 1974 (68 years)
Alexander Burns Wallace was a Scottish plastic surgeon. He was a founding member and president of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons, and the first editor of the British Journal of Plastic Surgery. In authorship he appears as A. B. Wallace.
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John Crighton Bramwell
1889 - 1976 (87 years)
John Crighton Bramwell was a British cardiologist, professor of medicine, and one of the founders of cardiology as a specialist subject in the UK. Education and career and Martha Crighton, he was education at Cheltenham College, before matriculated in 1907 at Trinity College, Cambridge. There he was influenced by the physiologist Keith Lucas. In 1911 Bramwell started clinical medical training at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. At the start of WWI he joined the 1st East Lancashire Territorial Field Ambulance in Egypt. In 1915 he was granted leave for two months to take his final examination at the University of Manchester, where he graduated MB CHB.
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Jane Worcester
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Jane Worcester was a biostatistician and epidemiologist who became the second tenured female professor, after Martha May Eliot, and the first female chair of biostatistics in the Harvard School of Public Health.
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Carl Friedrich Haase
1788 - 1865 (77 years)
Carl Friedrich Haase, name sometimes spelled as Karl Friedrich Haase was a German obstetrician. In 1813 he obtained his medical doctorate from the University of Leipzig with the thesis Dissertatio de morbo coeruleao. In 1828 he was appointed professor of obstetrics and director of the maternity clinic at the medical-surgical academy in Dresden.
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Hans Horst Meyer
1853 - 1939 (86 years)
Hans Horst Meyer was a German pharmacologist. He studied medicine and did research in pharmacology. The Meyer-Overton hypothesis on the mode of action on general anaesthetics is partially named after him. He also discovered the importance of glucuronic acid as a reaction partner for drugs, and the mode of action of tetanus toxin on the body.
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Robert Remak
1815 - 1865 (50 years)
Robert Remak was a Polish embryologist, physiologist, and neurologist, born in Posen, Prussia, who discovered that the origin of cells was by the division of pre-existing cells. as well as several other key discoveries.
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Gordon Alles
1901 - 1963 (62 years)
Gordon A. Alles , was an American chemist and pharmacologist who did extensive research on the isolation and properties of insulin for the treatment of diabetics. He is also credited with discovering and publishing the physiological effects of amphetamine and methylenedioxyamphetamine . He is the first person to have prepared amphetamine sulfate, although not the amphetamine molecule. Alles first reported the physiological properties of amphetamine as a synthetic analog of ephedrine, and therefore received credit for this discovery. He enjoyed large royalties from Smith, Kline & French because he sold his patent rights for amphetamine to the company and it enjoyed large sales.
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Morton Prince
1854 - 1929 (75 years)
Morton Henry Prince was an American physician who specialized in neurology and abnormal psychology, and was a leading force in establishing psychology as a clinical and academic discipline. He was part of a handful of men who disseminated European ideas about psychopathology, especially in understanding dissociative phenomenon; and helped found the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1906, which he edited until his death.
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Martin Dewey
1881 - 1933 (52 years)
Dr. Martin Dewey was an American orthodontist and a past president of the American Association of Orthodontists and the American Dental Association. Dewey represented the "New School" of Edward Angle in the great Extraction Debate of 1911 held in New York City.
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Paul Ferdinand Schilder
1886 - 1940 (54 years)
Paul Ferdinand Schilder was an Austrian psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and medical researcher. Schilder's research work in both neurophysiology and neuropathology, coupled with an active interest in philosophy, led to his involvement in psychoanalysis. He became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society founded by Sigmund Freud, although he never underwent analysis himself. He deviated from accepted psychoanalytic doctrine and published his own ideas. He started the integration of psychoanalytic theory into psychiatry, and he is considered one of the founding fathers of group psychotherapy.
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Salomon Eberhard Henschen
1847 - 1930 (83 years)
Salomon Eberhard Henschen was a Swedish doctor, professor and neurologist. Biography Background and education Henschen was born in Uppsala, Sweden. He was the son of Lars Wilhelm Henschen and wife Augusta Munck af Rosenschöld . He had five siblings, including Maria Henschen , the founder of the Uppsala högre elementarläroverk för flickor and publicist .
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George Franklin Grant
1847 - 1910 (63 years)
George Franklin Grant was the first African-American professor at Harvard. He was also a Boston dentist, and an inventor of an early composite golf tee made from wood and natural rubber tubing. Biography Grant was born on September 15, 1846, in Oswego, New York, to Phillis Pitt and Tudor Elandor Grant. He attended the Bordentown School in Bordentown, New Jersey.
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Waldo Nelson
1898 - 1997 (99 years)
Waldo E. "Bill" Nelson was an American pediatrician who was sometimes referred to as "the father of pediatrics". Nelson authored the leading pediatric textbook and was a longtime editor of The Journal of Pediatrics. He led the pediatrics department at Temple University School of Medicine.
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Mahmud Bayumi
1890 - Present (136 years)
Mahmud Bayumi, FRCS was an Egyptian orthopaedic surgery professor at Kasr El Aini Medical School. He established the Kasr El Aini Orthopaedic Surgery Department with Professor Mohamed Kamel Hussein. He is the father of the actor Ahmed Ramzy.
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Rickman Godlee
1849 - 1925 (76 years)
Sir Rickman John Godlee, 1st Baronet was an English surgeon. In 1884 he became one of the first doctors to surgically remove a brain tumor, founding modern brain surgery. Early life Godlee was born in Upton, Essex, to a Quaker family, the second son of Rickman Godlee , a barrister at Middle Temple, and Mary Godlee , daughter of Joseph Jackson Lister. He was thus a nephew of Joseph Lister — whose biography he later wrote.
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Louis Lewin
1850 - 1929 (79 years)
Louis Lewin was a German pharmacologist. In 1887 he received his first sample of the Peyote cactus from Dallas, Texas-based physician John Raleigh Briggs , and later published the first methodical analysis of it, causing a variant to be named Anhalonium lewinii in his honor.
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Józef Brudziński
1874 - 1917 (43 years)
Józef Polikarp Brudziński was a Polish pediatrician born in the village of Bolewo . He studied medicine in Tartu and Moscow, and in 1897 moved to Kraków, where he trained in pediatrics. Later, he worked in Graz under Theodor Escherich , and in Paris with Doctors Jacques-Joseph Grancher , Antoine Marfan and Victor Henri Hutinel .
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Stafford L. Warren
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Stafford Leak Warren was an American physician and radiologist who was a pioneer in the field of nuclear medicine and best known for his invention of the mammogram. Warren developed the technique of producing stereoscopic images of the breast with X-rays while working in the Department of Radiology at the University of Rochester School of Medicine.
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Carl Flügge
1847 - 1923 (76 years)
Carl Flügge was born on September 12, 1847 in Hanover, Germany. He pursued his education in medicine in several cities across Germany and became a successful bacteriologist and hygienist. Flügge’s major contribution to science and medicine was the discovery of Flügge droplets. His hypothesis that droplets could contain dangerous pathogens instrumental in spreading respiratory diseases let to the concept of droplet transmission. Flügge was honored with the distinction of being the first chair of hygiene at the University of Göttingen. He also taught at the University of Wrocław and Humboldt University of Berlin.
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Alfred Vogt
1879 - 1943 (64 years)
Alfred Vogt was a Swiss ophthalmologist, known for his development of techniques for retinoscopy and the surgical management of retinal detachment. Alfred Vogt received his doctorate from the University of Basel in 1904. After training in ophthalmology under professor Karl Mellinger in Basel, Vogt started private practice in 1906. In 1909 he was appointed head physician of the ophthalmological department of the cantonal hospital in the city of Aarau. In 1917 he was appointed professor extraordinarius and director of the University of Basel's eye clinic. In 1923 he was appointed professor ordi...
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Otto Lanz
1865 - 1935 (70 years)
Otto Lanz was a Swiss surgeon. He studied medicine at several universities in Europe, and in 1890–92 served as an assistant to Theodor Kocher at the University of Bern. Afterwards, he took an extended study trip to Berlin, Naples and London, and in 1894 settled as a docent of surgery at Bern. In 1902 he was named a professor of surgery at the University of Amsterdam.
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Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard
1817 - 1894 (77 years)
Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard FRS was a Mauritian physiologist and neurologist who, in 1850, became the first to describe what is now called Brown-Séquard syndrome. Early life Brown-Séquard was born at Port Louis, Mauritius, to an American father and a French mother. He attended the Royal College in Mauritius, and graduated in medicine at Paris in 1846. He then returned to Mauritius with the intention of practising there, but in 1852 he went to the United States. There he was appointed to the faculty of the Medical College of Virginia where he conducted experiments in the basement of the Egy...
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Theodor Ziehen
1862 - 1950 (88 years)
Georg Theodor Ziehen was a German neurologist and psychiatrist born in Frankfurt am Main. He was the son of noted author, Eduard Ziehen . Education and career As a gymnasium student, Ziehen studied the works of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer at Lessing-Gymnasium in Frankfurt. Later he studied medicine in Würzburg and Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1885. While a medical student he studied the writings of David Hume, Spinoza, Plato and George Berkeley. Following graduation he worked as an assistant to Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum at the mental hospital in Görlitz, and in 1887 became an assistant to Otto Binswanger at the psychiatric clinic in Jena.
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Johann Christian August Clarus
1774 - 1854 (80 years)
Johann Christian August Clarus was a German anatomist and surgeon. In 1798 he obtained his medical doctorate from the University of Leipzig, where from 1803 to 1820, he served as an associate professor of anatomy and surgery. From 1820 to 1848 he was a professor of clinical medicine at the university as well as senior physician at Jacobshospital in Leipzig. In 1840/41 he served as university rector. From 1848 onward, he worked in his private medical practice.
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Major Greenwood
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Major Greenwood FRS was an English epidemiologist and statistician. Biography Major Greenwood junior was born in Shoreditch in London's East End, the only child of Major Greenwood, a physician in general practice there and his wife Annie, daughter of Peter Lodwick Burchell, F.R.C.S., M.B., L.S.A. The Greenwood family is recorded back to the twelfth century in the person of Wyomarus Greenwode, of Greenwode Leghe, near Heptonstall, Yorkshire, caterer to the Empress Maude in 1154. Greenwood was educated on the classical side at Merchant Taylors' School and went on to study medicine at University College London and the London Hospital.
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Jan Janský
1873 - 1921 (48 years)
Jan Janský was a Czech serologist, neurologist and psychiatrist. He is credited with the classification of blood into four types . Janský studied medicine at Charles University in Prague. From 1899, he worked in the Psychiatric Clinic in Prague. In 1914, he was named professor. During World War I Janský served two years as a doctor at the front until a heart attack disabled him. After the war he worked as a neuropsychiatrist in a military Hospital . He had angina pectoralis and died of ischaemic heart disease.
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Hugh Macdonald Sinclair
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Hugh Macdonald Sinclair, FRCP was a medical doctor and researcher into human nutrition. He is most widely known for claiming that what he called "diseases of civilization" such as coronary heart disease, cancer, diabetes, inflammation, strokes and skin disease are worsened by "bad fats".
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Luther Emmett Holt
1855 - 1924 (69 years)
Luther Emmett Holt was an American pediatrician and author, noted for writing The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses in 1894. Born near Rochester, New York, Holt graduated from the University of Rochester in 1875. He went to medical school in the University at Buffalo and then the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, earning his M.D. in 1880. He pioneered the science of pediatrics, and became the head physician at New York's Babies Hospital in 1888. Under his leadership it became the leading pediatric hospital of its time.
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Göran Liljestrand
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Göran Liljestrand , Swedish pharmacologist, known for the discovery of the Euler-Liljestrand mechanism. Liljestrand was born in Gothenburg but finished school at the Norra Real school in Stockholm, before matriculating at the University College of Stockholm in 1904. He continued his studies at the Karolinska Institute, completed his medicine kandidat degree in 1909, the Licentiate of Medical Science degree in 1915, and his doctorate in 1917, becoming docent of physiology at the Institute the same year. He held the professorship in pharmacology and physiology at the Karolinska Institute from 1...
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Alfred Fröhlich
1871 - 1953 (82 years)
Alfred Fröhlich was an Austrian-American pharmacologist and neurologist born in Vienna. Biography Fröhlich was born in Vienna, into a Jewish family. In 1895 he graduated from the University of Vienna, afterwards remaining at Vienna as an assistant to Carl Nothnagel . In 1905 he became a member of the department of pharmacology at the university, and from 1919 until 1939 he was a full professor of pharmacology and toxicology. Following the Nazi takeover of Austria, Fröhlich emigrated to the United States, where he worked at the May Institute of Medical Research of the Jewish Hospital of Cincinnati.
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Thomas Lewis
1881 - 1945 (64 years)
Sir Thomas Lewis, CBE, FRS, FRCP was a Welsh cardiologist. He coined the term "clinical science". Early life and education Lewis was born in Taffs Well, Cardiff, Wales, the son of Henry Lewis, a mining engineer, and his wife Catherine Hannah . He was educated at home by his mother, apart from a year at Clifton College, which he left due to ill-health, and the final two years by a tutor. Already planning to become a doctor, at the age of sixteen he began a Bachelor of Science course at University College, Cardiff, graduating three years later with first class honours. In 1902 he entered University College Hospital in London to train as a doctor, graduating MBBS with the gold medal in 1905.
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Francis Gano Benedict
1870 - 1957 (87 years)
Francis Gano Benedict was an American chemist, physiologist, and nutritionist who developed a calorimeter and a spirometer used to determine oxygen consumption and measure metabolic rate. Biography Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Benedict attended Harvard University, earning his bachelor's degree in 1893 and his master's degree in 1894. He earned his Ph.D., magna cum laude, at Heidelberg University in 1895. He taught at Wesleyan University and did work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1909. He was also a descendant o...
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Robert Michaelis von Olshausen
1835 - 1915 (80 years)
Robert Michaelis von Olshausen was a German obstetrician and gynecologist. He was born in Kiel and died in Berlin. He was the son of Justus Olshausen , a professor of Oriental languages at the University of Kiel.
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Frederick Bogue Noyes
1872 - 1961 (89 years)
Frederick Bogue Noyes was an American dentist. His dental career began before the age of ten when he worked as an assistant to his dentist father. Noyes began dental practice before entering dental school , and while a student at Northwestern University Dental School, organized the first course on dental pathology in the United States, and began a long association providing illustrations for the texts of G. V. Black.
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Jeffrey L. Cummings.
#4437
Ladislas J. Meduna
1896 - 1964 (68 years)
Ladislas Joseph Meduna , a Hungarian neuropathologist and neuropsychiatrist, initiated convulsive treatment, the repeated induction of grand mal seizures in the treatment for psychosis. Observing the high concentration of glia in post-mortem brains of patients with epilepsy and a paucity in those with schizophrenia, he proposed that schizophrenia might be treated by inducing "epileptic" seizures. Thus, chemically induced seizures became the electroconvulsive therapy that is now in worldwide use.
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Anton Wölfler
1850 - 1917 (67 years)
Anton Wölfler was an Austrian surgeon born in Kopezten, a village near Kladrau, Bohemia. In 1874 he earned his medical doctorate from the University of Vienna, where he was a student of Theodor Billroth . Afterwards, he remained in Vienna for several years as Billroth's assistant. In 1886, he became a professor of surgery at the University of Graz, and from 1895 was a professor at Charles University in Prague.
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Henri Claude
1869 - 1945 (76 years)
Henri Charles Jules Claude was a French psychiatrist and neurologist born in Paris. He studied medicine under Charles-Joseph Bouchard , and was an assistant to Fulgence Raymond at the Salpêtrière Hospital. From 1922 until 1939, he served as chair of mental illness and brain diseases at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris, where he was succeeded by Maxime Laignel-Lavastine.
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Rudolf Magnus
1873 - 1927 (54 years)
Rudolf Magnus was a German pharmacologist and physiologist. He studied medicine, specialising in pharmacology, in Heidelberg, where he became associate professor of pharmacology in 1904. In 1908 he became the first professor of pharmacology in Utrecht, where he spent the rest of his working life. Had he lived, he likely would have been awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on animal reflexes. The authors of Nobel, the Man and his Prizes by H.Schück et al., edited by the Nobel Foundation wrote of Magnus and his co-worker De Kleyn: ‘The examiner [1927] declared that the work done by Magnus ...
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