William Heberden

William Heberden

William Heberden (1710 -1801) Famous English physician. William Heberden was one of the most prominent and respected physicians of his day. Samuel Johnson, the lexicographer, called him as "the last of our learned physicians." Along with William Cullen, he was the most admired physician of the mid-18th century. Heberden made many important contributions to medicine, particularly in the form of detailed clinical notes he kept throughout his career, which was later published as Commentaries on the History and Cure of Diseases in 1802. This book is considered the last of the great medical texts published in Latin. His son, William Heberden, the Younger, also a physician, translated it into English. He was the first to clearly state the distinction between chicken pox and small pox. He also provided a detailed description of angina pectoris. Heberden's nodes, bony outgrowths in the distal interphalangeal joints, a characteristic of osteoarthritis, are named after him.

Richard Morton

Richard Morton (1637 - 1698) English physician, who was the first to state that tubercles were always present in tuberculosis disease of the lungs (which was called consumption or phthisis in his time, J L Schonlein was the first to call it tuberculosis much later in1839), about which he published a landmark paper entitled Phthisiologica. He was also the first to describe the disease which is now known as anorexia nervosa, and he also gave the name chicken pox, which he believed was a milder variant of the dreaded small pox.

Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia

Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia

Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia (1510 - 1580) Italian physician and anatomist, known as the Sicilian Hippocrates. He is also considered as one of the founders of osteology and legal medicine. He was particularly close to Vesalius, and he described in detail the sutures of the skull, and also the ethmoid and sphenoid bones. The lesser wings of the sphenoid are sometimes referred to as the processes of Ingrassia. He was also one of the first to describe the stapes, which he called the stapha, after its resemblance to the stirrups used commonly in Sicily. As a physician, he is remembered as the first to make a distinction between chicken pox and scarlet fever.

Hans Conrad Julius Reiter

Hans Reiter

Hans Conrad Julius Reiter (1881 - 1969) German physician & member of the Nazis, convicted for his war crimes of conducting medical experiments on prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp, one of the first and the largest of the Nazi concentration camps. He was also a racial hygienist, about which he wrote a book, and a supporter of eugenics, and racial sterilization & extermination, in accordance with the manifesto of the Nazis. In 1916, when he was a military physician at the Western Front, he reported the triad of non-gonococcal urethritis, uveitis & arthritis, which has come to be eponymously referred to as Reiter's syndrome. In recent years, there has been an inclination to name the condition as reactive arthritis, considering the nature of Reiter's involvement in the holocaust, and also for the fact that Reiter was in no way the first to describe the condition.

Emile van Ermengem

Emile van Ermengem

Emile van Ermengem (1851 - 1922/32?) Belgian bacteriologist, who was the first to isolate Clostridium botulinum, the causative agent of botulism. van Ermengem named the bacterium, Bacillus botulinus, but the name was later changed to the present Clostridium botulinum. Emile van Ermengem was a student of Robert Koch, and later he worked at the University of Ghent, from where he was to make the discovery from a piece of ham that had caused the disease in a group of people attending a wedding party. His sons were the popular french writer Franz Hellens and the art critique Francois Maret.

Justinus Kerner

Justinus Kerner

Justinus Kerner (1786 - 1862) German physician, poet and writer of literary and medical subjects. Kerner was the first physician to provide a complete and accurate description of what has been historically known as sausage poisoning, or medically as botulism. From this, botulism is also sometimes referred to as Kerner's disease. The Kerner variety of grapes is named in his honor, since his songs and poems frequently dealt with wine & drinking. He spent most of his life in the historical town of Weinsberg, where the townspeople presented him with a house that became a major literary retreat for the writers of the time. In his old age, Kerner was increasingly blind, and at his death was buried next to his wife.