This is a list of famous physicians in history:

Physicians famous for their role in advancement of medicine

• Sir Magdi Yacoub One of the leading developers of the techniques of heart and heart-lung transplantation
• Samuel Hahnemann Creator of homoepathy
• Hippocrates (c. 460-370 B.C.)
• Galen (A.D. 129- c. 210)
• Madhav (8th century A.D.) - medical text author and systematizer
• Rhazes (A.D. c. 854-925) (Abu Bakr Mohammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi)
• Avicenna (980-1037)
• Averroës (1126-1198)
• Charaka Indian physician
• Maimonides (1135-1204)
• Girolamo Fracastoro (1473-1553) - wrote on syphilis, forerunner of germ theory
• Paracelsus (1493-1541)
• Ambroise Paré (1510-1590) - advanced surgical wound treatment
• Vesalius (1514-1564) - anatomist
• William Harvey (1578-1657) - described the circulatory system
• Ole Wormius (1588-1654) - pioneer in embryology
• Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694) - pioneer in histology
• Richard Lower (1631-1691) - studied the lungs and heart
• Jean Astruc (1684-1766) - wrote one of the first treatises on syphilis
• Edward Jenner (1749-1823) - popularized vaccination
• Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec (1781-1826) - inventor of the stethoscope
• William McBride discovered teratogenicity of thalidomide
• John Snow (1813-1858) - pioneer epidemiologist who studied cholera
• Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) - a pioneer of aseptic technique
• Joseph Lister (1827-1912) - pioneer of antiseptic surgery
• Theodor Billroth (1829-1894) - founding father of modern abdominal surgery.
• Pierre Charcot pioneering neurologist
• Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) - physician and anatomist
• Robert Koch (1843-1910) - formulated Koch's postulates
• William Osler (1849-1919) - called the "Father of Modern Medicine"
• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) - founder of psychoanalysis
• Christiaan Eijkman (1858-1930) - pathologist, studied beriberi
• Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) - Swiss psychiatrist
• William Mayo (1861-1939)
• Charles Jean Henri Nicolle (1866-1936) - microbiologist who won Nobel prize for work on typhus
• Allen Oldfather Whipple (1881-1963) - devised the Whipple procedure in 1935 for treatment of pancreatic cancer
• Otto Fritz Meyerhof (1884-1951) - studied muscle metabolism (Nobel prize)
• George Richards Minot (1885-1950) - Nobel prize for his study of anemia
• Norman Bethune (1890-1939) - developer of battlefield surgical techniques
• Frederick Banting (1891-1941) - described the role of insulin
• Charles R. Drew (1904-1950) - blood transfusion pioneer
• Virginia Apgar (1909-1974) - anesthesiologist who devised the Apgar score used after childbirth
• Joseph Ransohoff (1915-2001) - neurosurgeon who invented the modern technique for removing brain tumors
• Christiaan Barnard (1922-2001) - performed first heart transplant
• Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (b. 1923) - studied Kuru
• Susruta Indian surgeon
• Carlo Urbani (1956-2003) - discovered, and died from, SARS
• Carl Wood in vitro fertilization

Physicians otherwise notable as practitioners

• Thomas Sydenham (1642-1689) - clinician
• Johann Friedrich Struensee (1737-1772) - royal physician of Christian VII of Denmark
• Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910) - first woman to practice modern medicine
• Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836-1917) - first British woman to practice as a doctor.
• Alphonse Laveran (Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran) (1845-1922) - parasitology
• Jack Kevorkian (b. 1923) - right-to-assisted-death advocate
• Sir Horace Evans - UK royal physician

Physicians famous chiefly as eponyms

• Thomas Addison (1793-1860) - Addison's disease
• Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915) - Alzheimer's disease
• Robert Barany (1876-1936) - the Barany chair is used in the study of vertigo
• Charles Édouard Brown-Sequard (1817-1894)
• Albert Calmette - Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), a vaccine for tuberculosis
• Carlos Chagas (1879-1934) - Chagas disease
• Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) - Maladie de Charcot, Charcot joints , Charcot's triad, Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease
• Burrill Bernard Crohn (1884-1983) - Crohn's disease
• Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738-1814) - Guillotine
• Charles Mantoux - Mantoux test for tuberculosis
• Antoine Marfan (1858-1942) - Marfan syndrome
• Silas Weir Mitchell - Mitchell's disease
• James Paget - Paget's disease
• James Parkinson (1755-1824) - Parkinson's syndrome
• Cecil Charles Worster-Drought (1888-1971) Worster-Drought syndrome

Physicians famous as criminals

• Karl Brandt (1904-1948) - Nazi human experimentation
• Baruch Goldstein - assassin
• Radovan Karadzic (b. 1945) - accused of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia
• Josef Mengele (1911-1979) - known as the Angel of Death, Nazi human experimentation
• Samuel Mudd - condemned to prison for setting the leg of Abraham Lincoln's assassin
• Herta Oberheuser (1911-1978) - Nazi human experimentation
• Harold Shipman - British mass murderer

Physicians famous as writers

see also A Roster of Physician Writers

The most famous writers:

• Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) - Russian playwright
• Erasmus Darwin - English poet
• Alfred de Musset (1810-1857) - known as a writer, but also discovered de Musset's sign, an indicator of syphilitic aortitis
• John Keats (1795-1821) - British poet.
• François Rabelais (1483-1553) - French author of Gargantua and Pantagruel.
• Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), German writer, poet, essayist and dramatist.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) - British author of Sherlock Holmes fame.
• A. J. Cronin (1896-1981) - Scottish novelist and essayist, author of The Citadel.
• W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) - British writer (e.g., Of Human Bondage.
• Michael Crichton (born 1942) - American author of Jurassic Park blockbuster fame.

And others:

• Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) - British writer
• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) - American essayist
• Ctesias (5th century B.C.) - Greek historian
• David Livingstone
• Albert Schweitzer
• Mungo Park
• Sir William Gilbert
• Thomas Campion - poet, composer
• William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) - American writer, essayist and poet
• John Arbuthnot - author
• H. Richard Hornberger author of MASH
• Oliver Goldsmith - American author
• Michael Cook - American writer of suspense novels
• Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) - author
• Patrick Abercromby (1656 - ~ 1716) - historian
• Arthur Johnston (1587-1641) - poet
• Georg Büchner - German dramatist
• Ludwig Büchner - German philosopher
• Kurt Schopenhauer - German writer and philosopher
• João Guimarães Rosa - Brazilian writer
• Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) - American writer
• Lewis Thomas (1913-1993) - American essayist and poet
• Adeline Yen Mah - Chinese-American author.
• Janet Asimov - (born 1926) (née Janet O. Jeppson). American psychiatrist, wife of Isaac Asimov.
• Deepak Chopra - Indian/American writer of self-help and health books
• Alex Comfort (1920-2000) - British writer and poet, author of The Joy of Sex.
• Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). British poet and founder of the Lunar Society. The grandfather of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton
• Theodor Drachman (1904-19880 - American author
• Georges Duhamel (1884-1966) - French writer, dramatist, poet and humanist
• Havelock Ellis (1859-1940) - British writer and poet, author of The Psychology of Sex
• Samuel Garth (1661-1719) - British author and translator of classics
• William A. Hammond (1828-1900) - American writer.
• Ronald Laing - American writer and poet, leader of the anti-psychiatry movement.
• Stanislaw Lem (1929-) - Polish author of science-fiction (Solaris)
• Carlo Levi (1902-1975) - Italian novelist and writer
• Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793) - French writer and philosopher, also a leader of the French Revolution, was assassinated in a bathtub (see play by Peter Weiss and famous painting by Jacques-Louis David)
• Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932) - British writer and poet, immortalized also as the discoverer of the malaria parasite.
• Theodore Isaac Rubin (1923-). American author of Lisa and David fame.
• Oliver Sacks (1933-). British essayist (e.g. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat)
• Frank Slaughter (1908-) American bestseller author (e.g., Doctor's Wives)
• Benjamin Spock (1903-1988) - American pediatrician, wrote Baby and Child Care .
• Sir Henry Thompson, British surgeon and polymath.
• Atul Gawande , surgeon and New Yorker medical writer.
• Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1910) - Italian writer, wrote a science fiction book, L'Anno 3000

Physicians famous as politicians

• Salvador Allende Chilean president
• Arnulfo Arias Panaman President
• Tom Coburn (born 1948) - U.S. Senator
• Howard Dean (born 1948) - American politician
• Che Guevara Latin American revolutionary leader
• Christian Friedrich, Baron von Stockmar - Anglo-Belgian statesman
• Ray Lyman Wilbur (1875-1949) - United States Secretary of the Interior, president of Stanford University
• François Duvalier (1907-1971) - also known as Papa Doc - President and later dictator of Haiti
• Bill Frist (born 1952) - United States Senate Majority Leader
• Hastings Kamuzu Banda (1898-1997) - Prime Minister, President and later dictator of Malawi
• Juscelino Kubitscheck - Brazilian president
• Mahathir bin Mohamad - Malaysian prime minister
• Agostinho Neto (1922-1979) - MPLA leader and president of Angola
• David Owen British politician
• Ron Paul (born 1935) - American politician
• Bidhan Chandra Roy Indian politician
• Ali Akbar Velayati (born 1945) - Iranian Foreign Minister from 1981 to 1997.
• Mohammad Reza Khatami - Iranian politician
• Iyad Allawi - interim Prime Minister of Iraq

Physicians famous for other activities

• Jane Addams
• Michael Servetus (1511–1553) — burnt at the stake by Calvinists for heresy
• John Hall (d. 1635) — son-in-law of William Shakespeare
• Franz Mesmer (1734–1815) — proponent of mesmerism and the idea of animal magnetism
• Oswald Avery (1877–1955) — molecular biologist who discovered DNA carried genetic information
• Hans Sloan
• Thomas Young — scientist
• Maria Montessori — educator
• Benjamin Rush — signer of the United States Constitution
• Georg Agricola — mineralologist
• Ali Bacher — cricketer
• Thomas Bowdler — censor
• Gerolamo Cardano
• Arthur Dee
• Luigi Galvani — physicist
• Caspar Peucer
• Philippe Pinel
• Gordon S. Fahrni
• W. G. Grace — cricketer
• Claude Perrault — architect
• Nehemiah Grew — botanist
• Herman Boerhaave — humanist
• Jonathan Miller — television presenter and stage director
• Hermann von Helmholtz — physicist
• Niels Ryberg Finsen
• Albert Schweitzer — humanist
• Boris V. Morukov — cosmonaut
• Armand Hammer — entrepreneur
• Abd-el-latif — traveller
• Samuel Hahnemann — founder of homeopathy
• Norman Earl Thagard — astronaut
• Samuel Gridley Howe — abolitionist
• Archibald Menzies — naturalist
• William E. Thornton — astronaut
• Wilhelm Weinberg — with G.H. Hardy, developed the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium model of population genetics
• Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) — based his system of criminology on physiognomy
• Paul Möhring (1710–1792) — zoologist, botanist
• William Gilbert (1544–1603) — physician and physicist
• John Caius (1510–1573) — physician and educator
• Mouwafak al-Rabii — human rights advocate, member of the Interim Iraqi Governing Council
• Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) — philosopher
• Stuart Kauffman (b. 1939) — biologist
• James McHenry (1753–1816) — signer of the United States Constitution
• John Lovelock (1910–1949) — Olympic athlete
• Haing S. NgorOscar winning film actor
• Sextus Empiricus (2nd–3rd century C.E.) - philosopher
• Daniel Rutherford (1849–1819) — chemist
• Maximilian Bircher-Benner (1867–1939) — nutritionist
• Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers (1758–1840) — astronomer
• Jan Baptist van Helmont (1577–1655) — physiologist
• Mae Jemison (b. 1956) — astronaut
• Nostradamus — French esoterist.
• Ashoka Prasad — Indian medical researcher
• Kurt Schopenhauer — philosopher
• Sócrates — football (soccer) player
• JPR Williams — rugby union player
• Peter Mark Roget — English lexicographer
• Jacques Rogge — sports official
• June McCarroll — inventor of lane markings