Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917) was a pioneering British physician, feminist, and suffragist who became the first woman to qualify as a physician and surgeon in Britain. Facing numerous obstacles due to her gender, she persisted in her pursuit of a medical career, attending medical lectures in secret and eventually gaining acceptance to the Society of…
James Parkinson (1755–1824) was a multifaceted English medical pioneer, best known for his groundbreaking identification of Parkinson’s disease in his 1817 work, “An Essay on the Shaking Palsy.” As a surgeon, apothecary, geologist, and political activist, Parkinson’s contributions extended well beyond medicine into geology and social reform. His detailed description of the symptoms of what…
William Harvey, an English physician born in 1578, revolutionized medical science with his detailed analysis of the circulatory system. His seminal work, “De Motu Cordis” (1628), introduced the then-radical theory that blood circulates continuously around the body, pumped by the heart through arteries and veins. This challenged the centuries-old misconceptions based on Galenic physiology, which…
