Health Care Heroes

Edward Jenner

Smallpox vaccine

Hippocrates

Father of medicine

Joseph Murray

First successful kidney transplant

Frederick Hopkins

Vitamins are essential for good health

Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier

HIV

William Harvey

Circulatory system

Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen

X-ray

Watson and Crick

DNA

Frederick Banting

Insulin

Louis Pasteur

Germ theory

Alexander Fleming

Penicillin

Anton van Leeuwenhoek

First microscope

James Lind

Citrus fruits prevent scurvy

Sir Humphry Davy and Horace Wells

Nitrous oxide as anesthetic

William Morton

Ether as an anesthetic

Rene Laennec

Stethoscope

James Blundell

First successful blood transfusion

Joseph Lister

Anesthetic / childbed fever

Karl Landsteiner

Discovery of blood antibodies

Michael DeBakey

Pioneering procedures in cardiovascular surgery

Elizabeth Blackwell

First female physician

Florence Nightingale

Founder of modern nursing

Clara Barton

Founder of the Red Cross

Robert Jarvik

First successful permanent artificial heart

William Hounsfield

CT scanner

Ignaz Semmelweis

Handwashing

Marie Curie

Discovery of radium

Gerty Cori

First woman to win Nobel Prize in medicine

Henry Judah Heimlich

Life-saving choking maneuver

William Kouwenhoven

CPR / defibrillation