most influencial person in the history of medicine

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entropy2

my vote: galen
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ME, you just don't know it yet...
 
snow
 
Kevorkian. Haha.
 
.
 
Lister or Florey (with regards to Penicillin). Seilienne if you're interested (i'm assuming you chose Flemming with regards to Penicillin) i highly recommend you read "the mold in dr. florey's coat". it's a really interesting background on the discovery and development of penicillin. i think flemming receives a lot of credit where much of it is due to florey... sorry for the rant...
 
Hippocrates :O
 
how about the father of our profession?

Hippocrates

I've said him before in similar conversations as this and people think I'm just saying it because I'm Greek (which has nothing to do with it, I could care less), but seriously, he's gotta be somewhere near the top of the list...
 
maybe Lister, at least in the more modern era ?
 
another vote for snow, but i'm a tad biased ;)
 
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Galen was a tool. Give me William Harvey, the man who put him in his place. Well, one of them. Jenner's also a fine choice.
 
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis
 
Watson and Crick - DNA was a big one
 
Very hard to narrow it down to just one, so I will give my opinion of the big ones:

Hippocrates, Galen (although he was wrong about a lot of stuff), Pasteur, Virchow, Watson, Crick, and a few others that I am forgetting from my medical history course.
 
watson/crick, give med 20-50 yrs
 
can the previous posters please provide a reasoning for their votes? I looked up Galen and learned he was a surgeon to gladiators but dont see why people would pick him......
 
razmataz said:
can the previous posters please provide a reasoning for their votes? I looked up Galen and learned he was a surgeon to gladiators but dont see why people would pick him......
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entertainment of course, we cant have those russell crowes dying on us, need to patch them up and send them right back out to spar. eh, im getting drowsy. anyway as for watson/crick dna is important to medicine and will become increasingly important
 
Shredder said:
entertainment of course, we cant have those russell crowes dying on us, need to patch them up and send them right back out to spar. eh, im getting drowsy. anyway as for watson/crick dna is important to medicine and will become increasingly important
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haha, yea, ur definitely sleepy. ur reasoning used the word "important" 2x and it still doesnt make sense :laugh:
 
jtank said:
haha, yea, ur definitely sleepy. ur reasoning used the word "important" 2x and it still doesnt make sense :laugh:
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haha...yeah i guess youre right, i had reasoning in my head and didnt really articulate it, just thought it was understood. well genetics is the real deal is what i meant, ive read books and websites that all agree its going to be increasingly considered in dealing with patients. for example in drug development and prescriptions, and prevention advice
 
OK....It's late, i'm tired and typing with one hand (NO not for that reason, I broke my wrist this weekend) so I'll just let you all read up on the good Herr Semmelweis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

He did more for establishing clinical disease prevention as an idea than nearly any other person, and most people have no idea who he is.
 
BrettBatchelor said:
Salk (sp?) - Polio vaccination is a big one for our generation.
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Did you hear about the outbreak of polio in an Amish community in Minnesota? The Salk vaccine was definitely huge for medicine, but it seems like the strain that broke out in Minnesota was a back-mutated Salk strain that became virulent and was carried in an immunodeficient child. They're reporting 4 cases, but they only tested 5 families in the community of 20 families, so there are definitely more. This is why they can't declare polio eradicated until they phase out the live virus vaccine for a decade or so.

Anyway, I also want to reiterate my vote for Lister. Pasteur is also up there.
 
Maybe not the most influential in the entire history of medicine, but a pretty big one (at least in my experience) for recent history:

Frank Netter :D
 
Ignaz P. Semmelweis
(Pity he went nuts.)





How 'bout Dr. L Burnett? :smuggrin:
 
sunnyjohn said:
Ignaz P. Semmelweis
(Pity he went nuts.)

How 'bout Dr. L Burnett?
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Avicenna. Definitely. He was the father of modern medicine.
 
Osler - inspirational individual considered by many the "quintessential physician"
 
We should get in the practice of mentioning Franklin with Watson and Crick.

(PS my vote is not for W/C/F though)
 
Bernito said:
We should get in the practice of mentioning Franklin with Watson and Crick.

(PS my vote is not for W/C/F though)
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rosalind franklin
 
Fleming was an observant slob, Lister is good... Can you imagine doing what Jenner did today - ethics are a little sketchy there ;)

Watson and Crick are also very good, but... I'll give it to Linus Pauling. Pauling would have had the structure of DNA if it he had access to Franklin's X-ray crystallography data. Aside from the what if, the idea of orbital hybridization and resonance seems pretty important.

Here is an excerpt from a Pauling site:

"Pauling's involvement with human physiology and health, which dominated the last three decades of his research career, had long precedents. During the mid-1930s a significant part of his research, generously funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, moved into biochemistry—a field he had previously avoided—as he became increasingly interested in the highly complex molecules within living organisms. Applying techniques used in earlier diffraction studies to biological compounds, he now sought to understand the structure of proteins. In 1934 he investigated the magnetic properties of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying molecule in red blood cells. He then studied the roles of antigens and antibodies in the immune response, one aspect of the important phenomenon of specificity in biochemical interactions. In 1940 he made the novel proposal that this specificity is achieved through molecular complementariness, which he regarded as the secret of life. The concept—involving a "hand-in-glove" fit of one molecule against or into another molecule that has a shape complementary to the first—was tested in his laboratory over the next 10 years by means of numerous serological experiments, yielding results published in no less than 34 scientific papers. In 1946 Pauling postulated that the gene might consist of two mutually complementary strands—a concept anticipating Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA structure seven years later.

Pauling originated the concept of molecular disease. In 1945, while hearing a physician describe sickle cell anemia, he instantly surmised that it might be caused by a defect in the red blood cell's hemoglobin. After three years of painstaking research, he and his associate Dr. Harvey Itano identified this prevalent disease as molecular in origin—caused by a genetically transmitted abnormality in the hemoglobin molecule. In susceptible patients, hemoglobin molecules in venous blood, lacking oxygen, become self-complementary; distorted and sticking together, they form long rods that interfere with blood circulation. Pauling's description of this first molecular disease (as he called it) initiated a search for many more such disorders. The new idea quickly became immensely important in medicine and is now the main focus of human genome research. Thus the medical specialties of hematology, serology, immunology, applied genetics, and pathology owe much to Pauling's contributions, which were made long before his intense interest in the promise of nutritional therapy became widely known."

One of the most brilliant scientists to ever walk the Earth IMO.
 
Keep in mind we're talking about medicine, not science.
Inheritance has been a big part of medicine for decades, HOWEVER, we didn't really need to know the structure of DNA to understand how certain traits were passed along.
Also, while the structure of DNA and genomic technology has the possibility of leading to many (really awesome) treatments for heritable diseases, it has not done so thus far.

Just a thought. :)
 
Oh - how about some fun added in to the list. Estimate the MCAT score of your nominee (obviously you'll have to take some liberty with the answer)

Pauling = 15 PS, 15 BS, 15 VR, WS T

Pretty sure that's not over-estimating.
 
seilienne said:
Keep in mind we're talking about medicine, not science.
Inheritance has been a big part of medicine for decades, HOWEVER, we didn't really need to know the structure of DNA to understand how certain traits were passed along.
Also, while the structure of DNA and genomic technology has the possibility of leading to many (really awesome) treatments for heritable diseases, it has not done so thus far.

Just a thought. :)
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I understand your point since you could include Newton and Bernoulli in the mix, but have they truly contributed to medicine?

But considering the integral importance of o-chem into medicine, I still think Pauling is solid. :)
 
Most important? Impossible to name just one, but Semmelweis as many have mentioned was crucial in the formation of the germ theory of disease and hygeine. This marks the birth of modern medicine afaik.

You also have to give credit to Van Leeuwenhoek, Redi, and Pasteur for their contributions to this model.

Looking at it from a different angle, you might say Aristotle was the single biggest influence on medicine for the longest period of time, just not anymore ;)
 
Griffith; Hershey and Chase (those are the only experiments I understand)
 
Praetorian said:
OK....It's late, i'm tired and typing with one hand (NO not for that reason, I broke my wrist this weekend) so I'll just let you all read up on the good Herr Semmelweis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

He did more for establishing clinical disease prevention as an idea than nearly any other person, and most people have no idea who he is.
Click to expand...

:( Sorry about your wrist!
 
That's OK. It doesn't really hurt- never did, it just ached- but the position they put my wrist in makes it very hard to type.
 
seilienne said:
Keep in mind we're talking about medicine, not science.
Inheritance has been a big part of medicine for decades, HOWEVER, we didn't really need to know the structure of DNA to understand how certain traits were passed along.
Also, while the structure of DNA and genomic technology has the possibility of leading to many (really awesome) treatments for heritable diseases, it has not done so thus far.

Just a thought. :)
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thats true, the potential of dna technology has yet to fully manifest itself, so watson/crick is more of a speculation. ill change then to
sunnyjohn said:
How 'bout Dr. L Burnett? :smuggrin:
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sdn will go down in the annals of history!
 
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