List of physicians
This is a list of famous physicians in history.
Chronological lists
Ancient physicians
30th century BCE to 4th century CE- List of ancient physicians
Post-classical physicians
- List of post-classical physicians
Early modern physicians
- List of early modern physicians
Late modern physicians
- List of late modern physicians
- Wilfrid Edgecombe — English surgeon, spa doctor and general practitioner.
Physicians famous for their role in advancement of medicine
- William Osler Abbott — co-developed the Miller-Abbott tube
- William Stewart Agras — feeding behavior
- Virginia Apgar — anesthesiologist who devised the Apgar score used after childbirth
- Jean Astruc — wrote one of the first treatises on syphilis
- Averroes — Andalusian polymath
- Avicenna — Persian physician
- Gerbrand Bakker — Dutch physician, with works in Dutch and Latin on midwifery, practical surgery, animal magnetism, worms, the human eye, comparative anatomy, and the anatomy of the brain
- Frederick Banting — isolated insulin
- Christiaan Barnard — performed first heart transplant
- Charles Best — assisted in the discovery of insulin
- Norman Bethune — developer of battlefield surgical techniques
- Theodor Billroth — father of modern abdominal surgery
- Elizabeth Blackwell — first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States; first openly identified woman to receive a medical degree; pioneered the advancement of women in medicine
- Alfred Blalock — noted for his research on the medical condition of shock and the development of the Blalock-Taussig Shunt, surgical relief of the cyanosis from Tetralogy of Fallot, known commonly as the blue baby syndrome, with his assistant Vivien Thomas and pediatric cardiologist Helen Taussig
- James Carson
- Charaka — Indian physician
- Jean-Martin Charcot — pioneering neurologist
- Guy de Chauliac — one of the first physicians to have an experimental approach towards medicine; also recorded the Black Death
- Anna Manning Comfort — first woman medical graduate to practice in the state of Connecticut
- Loren Cordain — American nutritionist and exercise physiologist, Paleolithic diet
- Harvey Cushing — American neurosurgeon; father of modern-day brain surgery
- Garcia de Orta — revealed herbal medicines of India, described cholera
- Gerhard Domagk — pathologist and bacteriologist; credited with the discovery of sulfonamidochrysoidine, the first commercially available antibiotic; won 1939 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Charles R. Drew — blood transfusion pioneer
- Helen Flanders Dunbar — important early figure in U.S. psychosomatic medicine
- Galen — Roman physician and anatomist
- Paul Ehrlich — German scientist; won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; developed Ehrlich's reagent
- Christiaan Eijkman — pathologist, studied beriberi
- Pierre Fauchard — father of dentistry
- René Gerónimo Favaloro — Argentine cardiac surgeon who created the coronary bypass grafting procedure
- Alexander Fleming — Scottish scientist, inventor of penicillin
- Girolamo Fracastoro — wrote on syphilis, forerunner of germ theory
- Sigmund Freud — founder of psychoanalysis
- Daniel Carleton Gajdusek — studied Kuru, Nobel Prize winner
- George E. Goodfellow — recognized as first U.S. civilian trauma surgeon, expert in gunshot wound treatment
- Henry Gray — English anatomist and surgeon, creator of Gray's Anatomy
- Ernst Haeckel — physician and anatomist
- William Harvey — English physician, described the circulatory system
- Henry Heimlich — inventor of the Heimlich maneuver and the Vietnam War-era chest drain valve
- Orvan Hess — fetal heart monitor and first successful use of penicillin
- Hippocrates — Greek father of medicine
- John Hunter — father of modern surgery, famous for his study of anatomy
- Kurt Julius Isselbacher — Former editor of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, prominent Gastroenterologist, founder of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Association of American Physicians Kober Medal winner
- Edward Jenner — English physician popularized vaccination
- Elliott P. Joslin — pioneer in the treatment of diabetes
- Carl Jung — Swiss psychiatrist
- Leo Kanner — Austrian-American psychiatrist known for work on autism
- Seymour Kety — American neuroscientist
- Robert Koch — formulated Koch's postulates
- Theodor Kocher — thyroid surgery; first surgeon to win the Nobel Prize
- Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec — inventor of the stethoscope
- Janet Lane-Claypon — pioneer of epidemiology
- Thomas Linacre — founder of Royal College of Physicians
- Joseph Lister — pioneer of antiseptic surgery
- Richard Lower — studied the lungs and heart, and performed the first blood transfusion
- Paul Loye — studied the nervous system and decapitation
- Wilhelm Frederick von Ludwig — German physician known for his 1836 publication on the condition now known as Ludwig's angina
- Amato Lusitano — discovered venous valves, studied blood circulation
- Madhav — medical text author and systematizer
- Maimonides
- Marcello Malpighi — Italian anatomist, pioneer in histology
- Barry Marshall
- Charles Horace Mayo — co-founder, Mayo Clinic
- William James Mayo — co-founder, Mayo Clinic
- William Worrall Mayo — co-founder, Mayo Clinic
- Salvador Mazza — Argentine epidemiologist who helped in controlling American trypanosomiasis
- William McBride — discovered teratogenicity of thalidomide
- Otto Fritz Meyerhof — studied muscle metabolism; Nobel prize
- George Richards Minot — Nobel prize for his study of anemia
- B. K. Misra — first neurosurgeon in the world to perform image-guided surgery for aneurysms, first in South Asia to perform stereotactic radiosurgery, first in India to perform awake craniotomy and laparoscopic spine surgery.
- Frederic E. Mohs — responsible for the method of surgery now called Mohs surgery
- Egas Moniz — developed lobotomy and brain artery angiography
- Richard Morton — identified tubercles in consumption of lungs; basis for modern name tuberculosis
- Herbert Needleman — scientifically established link between lead poisoning and neurological damage; key figure in successful efforts to limit lead exposure
- Charles Jean Henri Nicolle — microbiologist who won Nobel prize for work on typhus
- Ian Olver
- Gary Onik — inventor and pioneer of ultrasound guided cryosurgery for both the prostate and the liver
- William Osler — "father of modern medicine"
- Ralph Paffenbarger — conducted classic studies demonstrating conclusively that active people reduce their risk of heart disease and live longer
- George Papanicolaou — Greek pioneer in cytopathology and early cancer detection; inventor of the Pap smear
- Paracelsus — founder of toxicology
- Ambroise Paré — advanced surgical wound treatment
- Wilder Penfield — pioneer in neurology
- Marcus Raichle — father of functional neuroimaging
- Santiago Ramón y Cajal — father of modern neuroscience for his development of the neuron theory
- Joseph Ransohoff — neurosurgeon who invented the modern technique for removing brain tumors
- Sir William Refshauge — Australian public health administrator
- Rhazes
- Juan Rosai — advanced surgical pathology; discovered the desmoplastic small round cell tumor and Rosai–Dorfman disease
- Jonas Salk — developed a vaccine for polio
- Lall Sawh — Trinidadian surgeon/urologist and pioneer of kidney transplantation in the Caribbean
- Martin Schurig — first physician to occupy himself with the anatomy of the sexual organs.
- Ignaz Semmelweis — a pioneer of avoiding cross-infection — introduced hand washing and instrument cleaning
- Victor Skumin — first to describe a previously unknown disease, now called Skumin syndrome
- John Snow — anaesthetist and pioneer epidemiologist who studied cholera
- Thomas Starzl — performed the first liver transplant
- Andrew Taylor Still — father of osteopathic medicine
- Susruta — Indian physician and pioneering surgeon
- Thomas Sydenham — clinician
- James Mourilyan Tanner — developed Tanner stages and advanced auxology
- Helen B. Taussig — founded field of pediatric cardiology, worked to prevent thalidomide marketing in the US
- Jeannette Throckmorton - served as librarian of the Iowa State Medical Library for almost 34 years
- Carlo Urbani — discovered and died from SARS
- Andreas Vesalius — Belgian anatomist, often referred to as the founder of modern human anatomy
- Vidus Vidius — first professor of medicine at the College Royal and author of medical texts
- Rudolf Virchow — German pathologist, founder of fields of comparative pathology and cellular pathology
- Carl Warburg — German/British physician and clinical pharmacologist, inventor of Warburg's Tincture, a famed antipyretic and antimalarial medicine of the Victorian era
- Otto Heinrich Warburg — German physiologist, medical doctor; Nobel prize 1931
- Allen Oldfather Whipple — devised the Whipple procedure in 1935 for treatment of pancreatic cancer
- Priscilla White — developed classification of diabetes mellitus and pregnancy to assess and reduce the risk of miscarriage, birth defect, stillbirth, and maternal death
- Carl Wood — developed and commercialized in-vitro fertilization
- Alfred Worcester — pioneer in geriatrics, palliative care, appendectomy, cesarean section, student health, nursing education
- Ole Wormius — pioneer in embryology
- Sir Magdi Yacoub — one of the leading developers of the techniques of heart and heart-lung transplantation
- Boris Yegorov — first physician in space
- Zhang Xichun — first physician to integrate Chinese and Western medicine