Make an Appointment With This Quiz on Famous Doctors

In 1885, Arthur Conan Doyle got his M.D., and based his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, on one of his medical professors. Michael Crichton got his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1969. The next year, he recalled his experiences in the memoir “Five Patients.” In the late 19th century, Anton Chekhov retired from medicine to write, but still practiced on the side for free. He wrote, “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature my mistress.”

The first long-term successful organ transplant was performed by Joseph Murray in 1954. The patient received a kidney from his twin brother and the organ survived for another eight years. In 1990, Murray received the Nobel Prize in medicine for his breakthrough surgery.

Dr. Virginia Apgar was the first female board-certified anesthesiologist, but it was her interest in obstetrics that led her to release a standard system to score infant health in 1952. Previous practice had focused on the mother, but the Apgar Score System requires personnel to check the baby’s appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, and respiration as health indicators. It is still in use today.

Before vaccination, inoculation involved instilling a small sample of smallpox from an infected person under the skin of a non-infected person. Inspired by his childhood inoculation, English doctor Edward Jenner attempted to improve the inoculation process in 1796. He took fluids from a milkmaid infected with cowpox, and infected a boy with the disease. The boy was later found to be immune to smallpox. Jenner’s work is commonly accepted to be the foundation of modern immunology.

A native of the Greek island of Kos, Hippocrates lived in the fifth century BCE, opened his own medical school, and also traveled to teach. More than 60 medical treatises have been attributed to him, including the Hippocratic Oath that doctors still take, typically at medical school graduation. Historians credit him with being the first to move away from the religious approach of treating diseases.

Dr. John Snow founded the Epidemiological Society during the London cholera outbreak of 1848. However, it was during an 1854 outbreak that he used maps, graphs, and logic to pinpoint one contaminated water pump on Broad Street as a source of disease. His “grand experiment” later that year gathered data from all over the city, and showed that water sources from more populated areas were less pure.

In 1861, Joseph Lister was already head of the surgical ward at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in the U.K. Lister followed the work of such people as Louis Pasteur and Florence Nightingale, and came to understand that unsanitary conditions could cause infections and made surgery much more dangerous. He insisted that carbolic acid be used to clean instruments, hands, and rooms — preventing countless deaths.

Born in France in 1822, Dr. Louis Pasteur studied alcohol production and developed the germ theory of fermentation. At the request of Napoleon III, Pasteur investigated the cause of wine spoilage, and found that it was microbes. Further, he discovered that heating the wine to around 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit) killed the germs. Today, this process is called pasteurization, and is applied to many foods and drinks.

Dr. Alexander Fleming was a bacteriologist at St. Mary's Hospital in London in 1928, when he came back from vacation and found that mold had started growing on a culture plate of staphylococcus bacteria in his lab. Fleming noticed that the mold was inhibiting growth of the bacteria, and this was the key to changing how bacterial diseases were treated. Fleming got a Nobel Prize in 1945 for his work on penicillin.

Born in England in 1821, Elizabeth Blackwell moved to the U.S. as a child. Inspired to become a doctor by a dying friend who had been embarrassed to see male physicians, she was accepted to New York’s Geneva Medical College in 1847, and graduated in 1849, becoming the first modern female doctor. Blackwell opened clinics for poor women and children, and became a prominent advocate for public health and sanitation.

A 1939 alumnus of the New York University College of Medicine, Dr. Jonas Salk was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine when he began research on polio, the viral nervous system infection that annually affected and sometimes paralyzed hundreds of thousands of children. In 1955, his vaccine — using a killed version of the virus — was released, and hailed as a momentous discovery.

In 1896, Maria Montessori became the first woman in Italy to graduate with a medical degree. When she was appointed assistant doctor at the University of Rome’s psychiatric clinic, Montessori began studying children with learning problems. She applied what she learned to children without disabilities, and started a movement of child-centric schools that follow the pupils’ interests.

On August 20, 1897, British physician Ronald Ross dissected the stomach of a mosquito that had fed on a malaria patient just four days prior. Inside, he found the parasite known to cause the serious and oftentimes deadly tropical disease. For his groundbreaking work, Ross was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1902.

A researcher into the digestive system, Dr. Ivan Pavlov developed the theory of the conditioned reflex after a famous experiment in which he gave food to hungry dogs while the sound of a buzzer or metronome was heard. He discovered that the dogs would salivate when they heard the noise, even if there was no food. In 1904, he received the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in recognition of his work.

Born in 1856, Dr. Sigmund Freud trained as a neurologist. He sought to discover the cause of neuroses, and developed the theory that they were formed by painful experiences in people’s pasts and hidden in the part of the mind he called “the unconscious.” Freud also came up with the theory that the psyche was made up of parts called the id, ego, and superego, and wrote the influential work “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1899).