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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.

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.

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

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

Isolated a pancreatic hormone before the Toronto insulin team.

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.

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

Penicillin; antibiotics have saved an estimated 200 million lives.

Recast affirmation as subconscious programming for a postwar readership.

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

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

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

Explained the nerve impulse in mathematical terms.

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.

Systematised classical homeopathy teaching; Right Livelihood laureate in 1996.

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

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