William Allen Sturge

William Allen Sturge

William Allen Sturge (1850 - 1919) British physician and archeologist, who was one of the doctors who first described Sturge-Weber syndrome (also known as encephalotrigeminal angimatosis), a rare congenital nervous and skin disorder, associated with port-wine stains, glaucoma, seizures, mental retardation, and ipsilateral leptomeningeal angioma. His first wife, Emily Bowell, was one of the first women physicians of England. After her death, he married one his nurses. Sturge was a keen collector of archeological specimens, and the later part of his life after retiring from medicine was devoted to archeology. William Allen Sturge had no children.

Johann Lukas Schonlein

Johann Lukas Schonlein

Johann Lukas Schonlein (1793 - 1864) German professor of medicine, one of the first to teach medicine in the local language than Latin. He was among the first to use bedside teaching as a method of learning clinical medicine. Schonlein is credited with giving the present name for two diseases, tuberculosis and hemophilia. Together with his student and pediatrician, Eduard Heinrich Henoch, he was the first to describe the eponymous Henoch-Scholein purpura, the most common vasculitis in children, characterized by the triad of non-thrombopenic purpura, arthritis and abdominal pain. He also discovered the parasitic cause of favus, a ringworm-like disease mainly affecting the scalp.

Ingaz Semmelweis

Ingaz Semmelweis

Ingaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818 - 1865) Hungarian physician, described as the "savior of mothers" for his pioneering role in discovering that washing hands (with chlorinated lime) could drastically cut the incidence of puerperal or childbed fever. He is considered one of the most important people responsible for adoption of  antiseptic measures in hospitals, though his theory and suggestions were mostly discarded by contemporaries of his time. Semmelweis died in a mental asylum, probably from septicemia from the infected wounds he had when he was severely beaten up by guards of the institution. Semmelweis reflex, which is a metaphor for the almost reflex like rejection of new ideas because it is against the popularly held belief, is named after him, as he himself suffered extensive rejection and ridicule for his beliefs about puerperal fever.

William Smellie

William SMellie

William Smellie (1697 - 1763) Scottish obstetrician, regarded as the father of British midwifery. He wrote a number of famous textbooks on obstetrics which were widely read. In many of his writings, he was helped by his friend and fellow physician-writer, the author Tobias Smollett. Smellie had a successful practice, and he designed new varieties of obstetric forceps, devised a maneuver to deliver the head first in case of breech presentation, and described in detail the mechanism of labor. Smellie was also a painter and musician, pursuits which he enjoyed in leisure after his retirement to the village of Lanark. Smellie and famous contemporary obstetrician William Hunter have recently been accused of conspiring in murdering young pregnant women to obtain bodies for further study of anatomical changes during pregnancy.

Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer

Edawrd Sharpey-Schafer

Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer (1850 - 1935) English physiologist, who coined the term "insulin" after theorizing that diabetes mellitus was caused by the deficiency in production of a single substance by the pancreas. He also coined the term "endocrine" for substances that are directly released into the bloodstream, after having discovered adrenaline with George Oliver (English physician and famed inventor of many medical instruments, such as the hemoglobinometer and arteriometer). The Schafer method of artificial respiration (the prone-pressure method) was named after him. He added Sharpey to his name as a tribute (and also to perpetuate) to his teacher, the Scottish anatomist William Sharpey (after whom Sharpey's fibres, which join the periosteum to the bone lamellae, are named).

Lazzaro Spallanzani

Lazzao Spallanzani

Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729 - 1799) Italian biologist of varied interests, who did important experiments in animal reproduction, human physiology, origin of life, and also other fields like volcanoes and weather and natural history. He was also a Catholic priest, and an indefatigable traveler and collector. His experiments on biogenesis, and the spontaneous origin of life paved way for Louis Pasteur's final and complete denunciation of the debate. Spallanzani was the first to carry out artificial insemination on a dog, and he proposed that for fertilization to occur, both sperm and ovum are essential. He was also the first to describe echolocation in bats, and carried out experiments on digestion, suggesting that digestion was more chemical in nature than just mechanical trituration. Louis Pasteur highly regarded the work of Spallanzani and had his portrait, along with that of Agostino Bassi, in his office. Spallanzani died of bladder cancer, and his bladder was removed by his colleagues and admirers for study after his death, and displayed at a museum in Pavia, where it remains to this day. It is one of the most famous preserved body parts in history.

Shen Nong

Shen Nong

Shen Nong (circa 2700 BCE) also known as the Emperor of the Five Grains or the Red Emperor, was a ruler of ancient China and cultural hero, considered the father of agriculture and medicine. He is reputed to have taught people the art of growing food by means of agriculture in order to avoid eating animals. He is said to have ingested hundreds and thousands of plants himself to discover their nature, thereby making him one of the first ancient herbalists. His discoveries of the various properties of plants were later assembled into a book, making it the earliest Chinese pharmacopoeia (The Divine Farmer's Herb-Root Classic). Shen Nong is also credited with the discovery of tea, and revered as the founder of acupuncture, a system of traditional Chinese medicine that uses the insertion of needles at specific predefined points on the body to cure various diseases, and also as a means to alleviate pain.