Untitled timeline

Born on December 27, 1822 in Dole, France, Dr. Louis Pasteur discovered that microbes were responsible for souring alcohol and came up with the process of pasteurization, where bacteria is destroyed by heating beverages and then allowing them to coo

Elizabeth Blackwell, an important figure in both the history of medicine and the women’s rights movement, achieved a historic triumph on Jan. 23, 1849, when she was awarded her Medical Degree by Geneva Medical College in New York. With that distinction she became the first woman doctor in U.S. history. She would go on to practice medicine, open the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, establish women’s medical schools in both England and the U.S., and write about the rights of women to be educated and to enter the medical profession.

Rudolf Virchow was a German pathologist, anthropologist and statesman, widely credited for his advancements in public health. Known as the "father of pathology," his scientific contribution of cell theory explained the effects of disease on the body. He also developed a standard method of autopsy procedure. In 1869 he founded a society which greatly intensifying German archaeological research.

Born in Scotland in 1881, Alexander Fleming served in World War I in the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he saw infected wounds take the lives of many soldiers. After the war, while thinking he had accidentally discovered a new enzyme in his lab, Fleming discovered antibiotics. In 1945, he was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Fleming died in London in 1955.

Born on January 18, 1856, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, Daniel Hale Williams pursued a pioneering career in medicine. An African-American doctor, in 1893, Williams opened Provident Hospital, the first medical facility to have an interracial staff. He was also the first physician to successfully complete open-heart surgery on a patient. Williams later became chief surgeon of the Freedmen’s Hospital.

In 1242, the Arabian physician, Ibn al-Nafis, became the first person to accurately describe the process of pulmonary circulation, for which he is sometimes considered the father of circulatory physiology. Although some of the earliest people already had the thought of the system, it was in the year 1628 that William Harvey announced that the discovery of the human circulatory system was his. He performed several tests and wrote an influential book, and these convinced the medical world to believe in the genuineness of the discovery. Harvey was not able to identify the capillary system connecting arteries and veins; these were later described by Marcello Malpighi. Also important to mention, Austrian biologist Karl Landsteiner and his group discovered four blood groups and develop a system of classification. Knowledge of the different blood types is crucial to performing safe blood transfusions, now a common practice.

Germ theory (discovered by French chemist Louis Pasteur) allowed our scientist to find the major causes behind disease, and created a whole new understanding on why cleanliness was important, as opposed to the old practice of surrounding oneself with bad smells to ward off bad influences. At that time, the origin of diseases such as cholera, anthrax and rabies was a mystery. The discovery of germ theory helped bring the knowledge of the importance of sanitation, and is one of the biggest factors in extending human life by prevention of disease.

Frederick Hopkins and a few other scientists discover (in the early 1900′s) that some diseases are caused by deficiencies of certain nutrients, later called vitamins. Through feeding experiments with laboratory animals, Hopkins concludes that these “accessory food factors” are essential to health.

Frederick Banting and his colleagues discover the hormone insulin (1920′s), which helps balance blood sugar levels in diabetes patients and allows them to live normal lives. Before insulin, diabetes meant a slow and certain death. Insulin stops the use of fat as an energy source by inhibiting the release of glucagon. When insulin is absent, glucose is not taken up by body cells and the body begins to use fat as an energy source or gluconeogenesis. For example, by transfer of lipids from adipose tissue to the liver for mobilization as an energy source.

Competing scientists Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier separately discover a new retrovirus later dubbed HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), and identify it as the causative agent of AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) – 1980′s.

Jean-Paul Marat, born in the Principality of Neuchâtel, was a physician, political theorist and scientist best known for his career in France as a radical journalist and politician during the French Revolution.

As a Catalan nationalist, he was forced into exile to England after the Spanish Civil War, during which he had been the chief of trauma services for the city of Barcelona. During World War II, he helped to organize medical emergency services there. His use of a new plaster cast method for the treatment of open wounds and fractures helped save a great number of lives during the war.

In 1864 she was appointed by Union General Benjamin Butler as the "lady in charge" of the hospitals at the front of the Army of the James. Among her more harrowing experiences was an incident in which a bullet tore through the sleeve of her dress without striking her and killed a man to whom she was tending. She is known as the "Angel of the Battlefield."

When the civil war broke out, the Blackwell sisters aided in nursing efforts. Blackwell sympathized heavily with the North due to her abolitionist roots, and even went so far as to say she would have left the country if the North had compromised on the subject of slavery. However, Blackwell did meet with some resistance on the part of the male-dominated United States Sanitary Commission. The male physicians refused to help with the nurse education plan if it involved the Blackwells. Still, the New York Infirmary managed to work with Dorthea Dix to train nurses for the Union effort.

On February 25, 1862 he received a commission as Assistant Surgeon of the 61st Regiment, New York Volunteer Infantry, which was part of the First Brigade, First Division, Second Army Corps of the Army of the Potomac. He would stay with the 61st for almost a year, being promoted to Surgeon on August 21, 1862.

Mary Edwards Walker, one of the nation's 1.8 million women veterans, was the only one to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor, for her service during the Civil War. She, along with thousands of other women, were honored in the newly-dedicated Women in Military Service for America Memorial in October 1997.When war broke out, she came to Washington and tried to join the Union Army. Denied a commission as a medical officer, she volunteered anyway, serving as an acting assistant surgeon -- the first female surgeon in the US Army. As an unpaid volunteer, she worked in the US Patent Office Hospital in Washington. Later, she worked as a field surgeon near the Union front lines for almost two years.

After World War I Alexander Fleming searched for anti-bacterial agents. From having the witness countless deaths in World War I from sepsis resulting from infected wounds. Antiseptics killed the patients' immunological defenses more effectively than they killed the invading bacteria.

Virchow made himself known as a pronounced democrat in the year of revolutions in Germany (1848). Earlier the same year, the government-employed doctor Virchow was asked to investigate an epidemic of typhus in the poverty-stricken area of Upper Silesia by the Prussian government.

Safiye Ali was the first Turkish woman to become a medical doctor. She treated the soldiers in the Turkish War of Independence, the Balkan Wars, and in World War I. She studied medicine in Germany in 1916, and opened her office in İstanbul in 1922

Dr. Herta Oberheuser killed healthy children with oil and evipan injections, preceding to removing their limbs and vital organs. The injections killed the child within three to five minutes from them being completely conscious to having their last breath. Herta Oberheuser was the only female defendant in the Nuremberg Medical Trial, where she was sentenced to 20 years in jail. She was released in April 1952 for good behavior and became a family doctor in Stocksee, Germany. She lost her position in 1956, after a Ravensbrück survivor recognized her, and her license to practice medicine was revoked in 1958. She died in January 1978 at the age of 66.

In the context of the 1933 Nazi law Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses (Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring), he was one of the medical scientists who performed abortions in great numbers on women deemed genetically disordered, mentally or physically handicapped or racially deficient, or whose unborn fetuses were expected to develop such genetic "defects". These abortions had been legalized, as long as no healthy Aryan fetuses were aborted.

Hippocrates of Cos or Hippokrates of Kos was an ancient Greek physician of the Age of Pericles, and is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine. He is referred to as the father of western medicine in recognition of his lasting contributions to the field as the founder of the Hippocratic School of Medicine.

Psychiatrist Jean E. Carlin, MD, spent two tours in Vietnam through the AMA volunteer effort, one in 1969, the other in 1971. She treated patients with malaria, tuberculosis, skin diseases and nutritional problems. During her second tour in 1971, she volunteered in what was then Saigon, where she did hospital rounds with surgeons and medical students and checked on pre- and postoperative children. Dr. Carlin, who was in her 30s at the time, made friends during her tours to Vietnam. She returned in 1979 to visit refugee camps.

In 1967, general surgeon William W. Funderburk, MD, spent two months in Danang, a city on the coast of the South China Sea. At a Danang hospital, he was in charge of the male surgical ward, which had about 60 beds and stretchers and 90 to 120 patients. About two in three surgeries at the hospital were for war-related injuries.

Richard Jadick was 38 years old when he started volunteering in the Iraq War. After experiencing a Marine bleeding to death he decided to open an emergency room on the battlefield so when the soldiers were injured they could get instant care. During the 11-day battle Jadick's team treated hundreds of men. Only one of those men died after reaching the hospital. Fifty-three Marines and United States Navy seals died during the battle. Jadick's commanding officer estimated that another 30 would have died if Jadick had not been working so close to the front.