who is the greatest physician of all time ?

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the best doctor is:


THE OP's MOM


sorry had to pull that one
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Dr. Chillingsworth from The Scarlet Letter. Only because he has a cool last name.
 
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Gut Shot said:
The original request was for a physician, not an egomaniacal sycophant.
Click to expand...

What has he ever done that makes him a sycophant? He's probably the most selfless person there is..

If you're going to attack someone you should probably explain why.
 
justwant said:
the best doctor is:


THE OP's MOM


sorry had to pull that one
Click to expand...

disappointed_gif_44556.gif
 
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A serious answer: Galen (Claudius Galen of Bergama). He took medicine that had remained stagnant for millenia and became the first surgeon to actually eviscerate someone and then put them back togeather. The guy was a badass who studied anatomy from gladiators and went on to become the personal physician to Marcus Aurelius.
 
Harvey Cushing, Paul Farmer, Richard Jonas (google this guy, seriously... he's amazing)
 
It's Hippocrates, the father of medicine!
 
who is the greatest physician of all time ?

Dr. Who is the greatest physician of all time.
 
SFO-IST said:
A serious answer: Galen (Claudius Galen of Bergama). He took medicine that had remained stagnant for millenia and became the first surgeon to actually eviscerate someone and then put them back togeather. The guy was a badass who studied anatomy from gladiators and went on to become the personal physician to Marcus Aurelius.
Click to expand...


Galen's "four humours" theory also stunted progress in medical science for another millenium and a half. :D

For my money, I think most of the "greatest physicians" lived and practiced during the early to mid-1900s, when we finally started to have some clue about how the human body actually works. Now, I don't meant to say that we really understand much of anything nowadays, but I think we're right on a lot of the fundamentals. As in, leukemia comes from malignant white blood cells produced in bone marrow, not an imbalance in your "black bile".

Pre-1900, I'd put down Rudolf Virchow, who basically founded modern cellular pathology and the principles of infectious disease. He may actually be number one, IMO. At the end of the 19th century, William Halsted took the opportunities provided by anesthesia, at the time newly discovered, and he pioneered a host of modern surgical techniques and his ideas influence the surgery profession even today (though his ghastly radical mastectomies were mostly unnecessary and/or unhelpful). In the early 1900s, Elliot Joslin was the first physician to specialize in diabetes, then a death sentence and wholly misunderstood disease. He basically defined our modern doctor-patient relationship and was one of the first physicians to involve patients actively in their treatment.

tl;dr - Virchow, Halsted, Joslin
 
Nobody has said Dr. John Watson yet?!?
Inconceivable.
 
Avicenna//his books were taught in European universities for several hundreds of years after his death.

lazy copying the intro to wiki article:"Avicenna was a Persian[5][6][7][8] polymath, who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived. In particular, 150 of his surviving treatises concentrate on philosophy and 40 of them concentrate on medicine.[9][10] His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia, and The Canon of Medicine,[11] which was a standard medical text at many medieval universities.[12] The Canon of Medicine was used as a text-book in the universities of Montpellier and Leuven as late as 1650.[13] Ibn Sīnā's Canon of Medicine provides a complete system of medicine according to the principles of Galen (and Hippocrates).[14][15] His corpus also includes writing on philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics, as well as poetry.[16] He is regarded as the most famous and influential polymath of the Islamic Golden Age.[17]"
 
Yo (Pepper) [Insert name here. i.e. Pepper, Dre, House, Galen],
I'm really happy for you. Imma let you finish but Jonas Salk had one of the best vaccine of all time. The best vaccine of all time. :cool:
 
Surprised nobody has said Vesalius yet. Galen stunted medicine for centuries. Vesalius brought it out of its dark age.
 
John Hunter. To see whether syphilis and gonorrhea were the same disease, he injected himself with a syphilitic patient's tissue, effectively giving himself the disease (or so he thought). He ended up contracting gonorrhea, and concluded they were the same disease.

Turns out the patient had syphilis and gonorrhea, setting back research on these diseases for about fifty years.
 
Must I remind you guys how many times this Dr has saved your life???
dr-who-david-tennant.jpg
 
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