Thinkers Timeline

Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BCE) was an ancient Greek physician, born on the island of Cos. He is one of the most important figures in the history of medicine, often called the father of medicine, though this title should be understood carefully: he was not the first person to practise healing but the founder of a tradition that understood medicine as a rational discipline based on careful observation rather than on supernatural explanations. Very little is known about his actual life. What we have is the Hippocratic Corpus, a collection of about sixty medical texts that were associated with his school, though they were probably written by many different authors over several generations. These texts cover anatomy, clinical observation, surgery, diet, and medical ethics. They represent the first systematic attempt to study disease through observation and reason, and to develop a set of ethical principles that should govern the relationship between physician and patient. The Hippocratic Oath, though its exact origin is debated, became the foundation of medical ethics across the Western world and beyond.

Paracelsus was a Swiss physician, alchemist, and reformer of medicine who lived during the early Renaissance. His real name was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He chose the name 'Paracelsus' himself, which probably meant 'beyond Celsus', the famous Roman medical writer. The choice gives a clear sense of his character: bold, self-promoting, and not modest about his abilities. He was born in 1493 in Einsiedeln, a pilgrimage town in what is now Switzerland. His father was a doctor and a mining-region physician. From childhood Paracelsus saw real medicine: how miners got sick, what minerals did to the human body, what worked and what did not. His mother died young. When he was about nine, his father moved the family to Villach in Austria, near more mines. He studied at several universities, took a medical doctorate in Italy, and then travelled across Europe, North Africa, and possibly the Middle East, learning from common healers, midwives, and surgeons as well as from books. In 1527 he was appointed city physician of Basel and lecturer at the university. He shocked everyone. He lectured in German rather than Latin. He publicly burned books by the ancient authorities, including Galen and Avicenna. He made enemies fast. Within a year he had been driven out. He spent the rest of his life wandering, treating patients, writing constantly, and quarrelling with the medical establishment. He died in Salzburg in 1541, aged 47, in still-unclear circumstances. His writings were mostly published after his death.

Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) was a Hungarian physician working in Vienna. He was born in Buda, in what is now Budapest, and studied medicine at the University of Vienna, where he became a senior assistant in the maternity ward of the Vienna General Hospital. There he confronted one of the most disturbing puzzles in medicine: women giving birth in the First Maternity Division of the hospital, which was staffed by medical students and doctors, died of childbed fever at a rate of about ten percent, sometimes much higher. Women giving birth in the Second Division, staffed by midwives, died at a rate of about four percent. Women who gave birth in the street before reaching the hospital had even lower mortality. Semmelweis spent years trying to understand why. In 1847, after the death of his colleague and friend Jakob Kolletschka from a wound infection during an autopsy, he made the connection: childbed fever was caused by cadaverous particles, infectious matter from corpses, carried from the autopsy room to the maternity ward on the hands of doctors and students who had been dissecting bodies. He introduced mandatory handwashing with a chlorinated lime solution and mortality in his ward fell dramatically. He never received the recognition his discovery deserved in his lifetime and was eventually committed to a mental institution, where he died at forty-seven, possibly from the same kind of infection his work had shown how to prevent.

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was a British nurse, statistician, and public health reformer. She was born into a wealthy English family and received an unusually thorough education for a woman of her time. Against fierce opposition from her family, who expected her to marry and manage a household, she pursued nursing, which was then a low-status occupation associated with poor and uneducated women. In 1854, during the Crimean War, she was sent with a team of nurses to the British military hospital at Scutari in present-day Istanbul, where she found conditions of horrifying neglect: thousands of soldiers were dying not from their wounds but from infectious diseases caused by overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate ventilation, and contaminated water. Over the following months she organised the care of the hospital, improved sanitation, and gathered careful data on the causes of death. After the war she spent the rest of her life, largely working from a sickbed due to a chronic illness she contracted in the Crimea, transforming nursing, hospital design, and public health through evidence-based argument and systematic use of statistics. She died in 1910 aged ninety.

Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) was a German physician, pathologist, anthropologist, and politician. He was born in Schivelbein in Pomerania, now part of Poland, and studied medicine in Berlin. He became one of the most important scientists of the nineteenth century, founding modern cellular pathology through his demonstration that all disease originates in the malfunction of cells, and that all cells come from pre-existing cells. He also made significant contributions to anthropology, archaeology, and public health. As a politician, he served for many years in the Berlin City Council and in the Prussian parliament and the German Reichstag, where he was a prominent liberal opponent of Bismarck. He used his political position to advocate for sanitary reform, improved housing, clean water supplies, and public health infrastructure. He famously declared that medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale. He lived until the age of eighty-one, remaining scientifically and politically active almost to the end, and died in 1902 from complications of a broken hip.

Tu Youyou is a Chinese medical scientist. In 2015 she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering artemisinin, a malaria drug that has saved millions of lives. She was born on 30 December 1930 in Ningbo, a city on China's east coast. Her family valued education. As a teenager, Tu caught tuberculosis and had to take two years off school. The experience pushed her toward medicine. When she returned to school, she knew she wanted to help fight disease. She studied at Beijing Medical College and graduated in 1955. She then joined the Institute of Materia Medica at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine. From 1959 to 1962 she took a special course that taught modern-trained scientists about traditional Chinese medicine. This combination shaped the rest of her career. In 1969, at age 39, she was put in charge of a research team on a secret Chinese government project called Project 523. The goal was to find a new malaria treatment. Over the next few years, Tu and her team worked through thousands of traditional herbal remedies. She found her answer in a 1,600-year-old Chinese medical book. The compound she isolated, now called artemisinin, became one of the most important drugs of the twenty-first century. She did this work without a PhD, without any study abroad, and without membership in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Some Chinese call her the 'three-nos professor'. She was promoted to senior researcher in 1980. She is still active at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences.

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi is a French virologist. She is one of the two scientists who discovered the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the cause of AIDS. She was born in Paris on 30 July 1947. Her family was not rich and had no connection to science or medicine. But as a child she spent her summers in the French countryside, watching insects and animals. She said later that the smallest insect could hold her attention for hours. This early habit of close observation shaped her whole life. She studied natural sciences at the University of Paris. She was bored by lectures. Instead, she spent her time volunteering at the Pasteur Institute, a famous research centre in Paris. There she worked with Jean-Claude Chermann, who was studying viruses called retroviruses. She earned her PhD in 1975 and did postdoctoral research in the United States. Then she returned to the Pasteur Institute, where she spent the rest of her career. In late 1982, a new disease called AIDS was killing people across the world. No one knew what caused it. A French doctor named Willy Rozenbaum asked Barré-Sinoussi's team at the Pasteur Institute for help. They took a tissue sample from a patient in early 1983. Within two weeks, Barré-Sinoussi detected a new retrovirus in the sample. It was the virus we now call HIV. The discovery was published in May 1983. Barré-Sinoussi was 35 years old. For the next 30 years, she worked on HIV. She set up her own laboratory in 1988. She became one of the world's leading AIDS researchers. She was president of the International AIDS Society from 2012 to 2014. In 2008, she shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of HIV. She retired from active research in 2015 but remained active as an advocate. In 2009, she wrote an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI after he said condoms did not help stop AIDS. She was in her 70s in 2026 and still speaking publicly on global health.

Paul Farmer (1959-2022) was an American physician, anthropologist, and global health activist. He was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, and grew up in modest and at times difficult circumstances, living for a period on a bus and then on a boat in Florida with his large family. He studied anthropology and medicine at Harvard University. In 1983, while still a student, he began working in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and never stopped. He co-founded Partners in Health in 1987, an organisation that has built health systems in Haiti, Rwanda, Lesotho, Liberia, Mexico, Peru, Kazakhstan, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere, demonstrating that high-quality healthcare could be delivered to the poorest communities on earth. He was a professor at Harvard Medical School, spent much of his time in Haiti, and travelled constantly between his field work, his Harvard obligations, and advocacy in international health policy. He died in his sleep in Rwanda in 2022 at the age of sixty-two, after a lifetime of working eighteen-hour days while sleeping in basic conditions and eating simply to remain as close as possible to the people he served.