Browse the index

Architect of the first pyramid and the earliest named physician in history.

Physician to gladiators and emperors whose anatomy ruled medicine for 1,400 years.

Treatise on Cold Damage remains a foundation of Chinese medicine.

Distinguished smallpox from measles and pioneered clinical case records.

Wrote the medical textbook that trained Europe's doctors until 1650.

Preserved and completed Ibn Sina's corpus.

Abbess, composer, and author of the first known European medical texts by a woman.

His Aristotle commentaries restarted European philosophy.

Guide for the Perplexed reconciled reason and revelation for Judaism.

Dissected humans himself and corrected Galen; founded modern anatomy.

Invented vaccination; smallpox is the only human disease ever eradicated.

Proved handwashing saves mothers' lives; ridiculed and died in an asylum.

Proved that invisible organisms cause disease — and that we can beat them.

Identified the mosquito as the vector of yellow fever.

Founded American psychology and, with Peirce, pragmatism; studied New Thought as 'mind-cure'.

The silver stain that made neurons visible.

Founded neuroscience by drawing the neuron doctrine.

Invented psychoanalysis and the modern language of the unconscious.

Doctor-playwright who invented modern drama's subtext.

First great synthesiser of Chinese and Western medicine; his case records still teach clinicians.

Ophthalmologist whose novels ignited the Philippine revolution; executed at 35.

Founded anthroposophic medicine with Ita Wegman; still practised in European hospitals.

The only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

Physician of Unani medicine who built its modern colleges and led the Indian National Congress.

Isolated a pancreatic hormone before the Toronto insulin team.

Founded Arya Vaidya Sala at Kottakkal and industrialised classical Ayurvedic pharmacy.

Dentist whose global survey of traditional diets tied refined food to physical degeneration.

Eradicated yellow fever from Rio and founded Brazilian public health.

German émigré who founded American naturopathy and its first college in 1902.

Co-authored the founding text of anthroposophic medicine and opened its first clinic in Arlesheim.

French consul in China whose L'Acuponcture Chinoise opened the practice to Europe.

Described a disease, its parasite and its vector single-handedly.

Opened Britain's first birth-control clinic; the charity still operates in 37 countries.

Penicillin; antibiotics have saved an estimated 200 million lives.

First Latin American science laureate; pituitary role in glucose metabolism.

Co-discovered insulin and sold the patent for one dollar.

Discovered pantothenic acid and argued for biochemical individuality — the idea beneath functional medicine.

Turned penicillin from curiosity into mass-manufactured medicine.

Recast affirmation as subconscious programming for a postwar readership.

Acquired immune tolerance, the basis of transplantation.

Rescued acupuncture from abolition and rebuilt it on anatomical terms with filiform needles.

Revived Kampo in Japan and secured its place inside the national health insurance system.

The Seven Countries Study put diet at the centre of cardiovascular prevention.

Logotherapy: meaning as the primary human drive, tested in the camps.

Led the campaign that won Ayurveda statutory recognition in independent India.

Discovered nerve growth factor in a bedroom lab under fascist persecution.

Wrote New Acupuncture (1951) and led the state institute that standardised the practice.

Surgeon-acupuncturist who built a biophysical model of meridian therapy.

Linked dietary fibre to Western disease patterns after describing Burkitt's lymphoma in Uganda.

Explained the nerve impulse in mathematical terms.

Polio vaccine, unpatented — 'could you patent the sun?'

Master physician of Guangzhou whose spleen-stomach theory shaped modern TCM curricula.

Ran the first double-blind trials in psychiatry and founded orthomolecular medicine with high-dose niacin.

Menninger researcher who founded clinical biofeedback and self-regulation therapy.

Exported Transcendental Meditation and revived classical Ayurveda as a global health programme.

Turned yoga into a precise therapeutic method taught in clinics and studios worldwide.

The century's most celebrated pulse diagnostician; chaired India's central Ayurvedic council.

Personal physician to the Dalai Lama who preserved Tibetan medicine through 17 years of imprisonment.

Founded Five Element acupuncture and the colleges that carried it across the English-speaking world.

Psychiatrist whose Wretched of the Earth remains the core text of decolonisation.

Carried macrobiotics from postwar Japan to the West and into the diet-and-disease debate.

Her arrest and trial in California led directly to acupuncture's legalisation in the state.

You Can Heal Your Life and Hay House globalised affirmation culture; its health claims are contested.

Monoclonal antibodies — now a $200bn class of medicines.

Extracted artemisinin from ancient texts; millions of malaria deaths averted.

Physician and writer who broke silence on FGM and patriarchy in the Arab world.

Systematised classical homeopathy teaching; Right Livelihood laureate in 1996.

Prospect theory founded behavioural economics and modern policy 'nudging'.

Co-led the Adverse Childhood Experiences study linking childhood trauma to lifelong disease.

Documented the relaxation response at Harvard and made mind-body medicine measurable.

Framed clinical practice around the tack rule — take out what harms, put in what's missing.

Built The Healer's Art curriculum, taught in medical schools on four continents.

Pioneer of reverse pharmacology, translating classical formulas into clinical trials.

Founded the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and trained a generation of fellows.

Founded the Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico and trained the first Western practitioners.

Created Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in 1979; now standard in clinics worldwide.

Physician of addiction and trauma; reframed illness as a response to lived adversity.

The Foundations of Chinese Medicine became the standard Western textbook of the field.

Coined and codified functional medicine; founded the Institute for Functional Medicine in 1991.

Discovered the opiate receptor and argued the body is a single emotional-molecular network.

Endocrinologist turned global voice of mind-body medicine; contested by clinical researchers.

Wrote The Web That Has No Weaver, then founded Harvard's programme in placebo studies.

Discovered telomerase, central to ageing and cancer research.

Co-founded Bastyr University, the first accredited natural-medicine university in the United States.

Vedic scholar whose texts linked Ayurveda, yoga and jyotish for Western students.

Drank the bacterium to prove ulcers are infectious, not stress.

Proved lifestyle change can reverse coronary artery disease; first such programme reimbursed by Medicare.

First Westerner to earn India's BAMS degree and license; interpreter of Ayurveda for the West.

Neurologist who put diet, glycemia and the microbiome at the centre of brain health.

Demoted, defunded, and right: her mRNA work produced the COVID vaccines.

Surgeon who has treated tens of thousands of survivors of wartime sexual violence.

Reversed her own progressive MS disability with a mitochondrial-nutrition protocol, then trialled it.

His 1993 survey of unconventional therapy use forced US medicine to take the field seriously.

Directed the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine and built the evidence agenda for whole-person care.

Co-discovered nucleoside-modified mRNA.

Took functional medicine mainstream through the Cleveland Clinic Center and a run of bestsellers.

Reprogrammed adult cells into stem cells, remaking regenerative medicine.

Herbalist-physician who shaped US botanical-medicine standards and education.

Made yoga and Ayurveda a mass movement and a corporate empire; repeatedly censured over health claims.