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Category
Disciplines in Medicine & Healing Traditions
Clinical medicine and public health alongside the functional, integrative, Chinese and Ayurvedic traditions.
Era
14 figures
Ignaz Semmelweis
1818 – 1865Proved handwashing saves mothers' lives; ridiculed and died in an asylum.
Louis Pasteur
1822 – 1895Proved that invisible organisms cause disease — and that we can beat them.
Camillo Golgi
1843 – 1926The silver stain that made neurons visible.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
1852 – 1934Founded neuroscience by drawing the neuron doctrine.
Sigmund Freud
1856 – 1939Invented psychoanalysis and the modern language of the unconscious.
Anton Chekhov
1860 – 1904Doctor-playwright who invented modern drama's subtext.
Rudolf Steiner
1861 – 1925Founded anthroposophic medicine with Ita Wegman; still practised in European hospitals.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie
1867 – 1934The only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
Nicolae Paulescu
1869 – 1931Isolated a pancreatic hormone before the Toronto insulin team.
Ita Wegman
1876 – 1943Co-authored the founding text of anthroposophic medicine and opened its first clinic in Arlesheim.
Georges Soulié de Morant
1878 – 1955French consul in China whose L'Acuponcture Chinoise opened the practice to Europe.
Marie Stopes
1880 – 1958Opened Britain's first birth-control clinic; the charity still operates in 37 countries.
Alexander Fleming
1881 – 1955Penicillin; antibiotics have saved an estimated 200 million lives.
Joseph Murphy
1898 – 1981Recast affirmation as subconscious programming for a postwar readership.