Physicians

What lands on a date

• 01-26 Wilder Penfield · Neurosurgeon who mapped the brain's sensory areas. source
• 02-03 Elizabeth Blackwell · First woman to earn a US medical degree. source
• 02-15 Emil Kraepelin · Psychiatrist who separated dementia praecox from mood disorder. source
• 02-17 René Laennec · Physician who invented the stethoscope. source
• 03-10 Marcello Malpighi · Microscopist who saw capillaries completing circulation. source
• 03-15 John Snow · Anaesthetist who traced cholera to a water pump. source
• 04-01 William Harvey · Physician who proved blood circulates in a closed loop. source
• 04-05 Joseph Lister · Surgeon who introduced antiseptic surgery. source
• 04-08 Harvey Cushing · Neurosurgeon who pioneered brain surgery. source
• 04-11 James Parkinson · Surgeon who described the shaking palsy. source
• 05-02 Benjamin Spock · Paediatrician whose baby book reshaped child care. source
• 05-06 Sigmund Freud · Neurologist who founded psychoanalysis. source
• 05-12 Florence Nightingale · Nurse whose statistics reformed military hospitals. source
• 05-17 Edward Jenner · Country doctor who pioneered smallpox vaccination. source
• 05-24 Helen Taussig · Paediatric cardiologist who helped devise the blue-baby operation. source
• 06-07 Virginia Apgar · Anaesthesiologist who created the newborn Apgar score. source
• 06-14 Karl Landsteiner · Immunologist who discovered the ABO blood groups. source
• 06-17 Susan La Flesche Picotte · First Native American woman to earn a medical degree. source
• 06-22 Cicely Saunders · Nurse-physician who founded the modern hospice movement. source
• 07-01 Ignaz Semmelweis · Physician who proved handwashing cut maternal mortality. source
• 07-08 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross · Psychiatrist whose stages of grief shaped end-of-life care. source
• 07-12 Claude Bernard · Physiologist who described the body's internal environment. source
• 07-12 William Osler · Physician who transformed clinical teaching. source
• 08-06 Alexander Fleming · Bacteriologist who discovered penicillin. source
• 08-26 Albert Sabin · Virologist who created an oral polio vaccine. source
• 09-07 Michael DeBakey · Cardiac surgeon who pioneered bypass and artificial hearts. source
• 09-10 Thomas Sydenham · Physician who classified diseases by bedside observation. source
• 10-13 Rudolf Virchow · Pathologist who grounded disease in cellular change. source
• 10-26 Paul Farmer · Medical anthropologist who built global health partnerships. source
• 10-28 Jonas Salk · Virologist who developed the first polio vaccine. source
• 11-05 Atul Gawande · Surgeon and writer on safety and systems in medicine. source
• 11-08 Christiaan Barnard · Surgeon who performed the first human heart transplant. source
• 11-14 Frederick Banting · Surgeon who co-discovered insulin for diabetes. source
• 11-26 Mary Edwards Walker · Surgeon and Medal of Honor recipient. source
• 12-11 Robert Koch · Bacteriologist who isolated tuberculosis and cholera pathogens. source
• 12-31 Andreas Vesalius · Anatomist whose dissections corrected Galenic error. source

The year rail

Some lives are known by year, not by day. Those entries are kept on a rail — never placed on a fabricated date.

• Hippocrates -460
• Galen 129
• Al-Razi 865
• Avicenna 980
• Ibn al-Nafis 1213
• Ambroise Paré 1510