🩺The Greats

Before treating emperors, the young Galen spent about four years, from 157 CE, as physician to the gladiators of his native Pergamon — a role that gave him an unmatched education in traumatic injury, since he could examine torn muscle, severed vessels and open joints in men who were otherwise healthy, then track who lived and who didn't. He later credited that brutal, practical apprenticeship, more than his formal philosophical training, with teaching him anatomy no dissection could show as clearly.

Zhang wrote in his own preface that a devastating epidemic killed more than two-thirds of his roughly 200-member clan within about a decade, seven in ten of them from 'cold damage' fevers — and that watching physicians of his time fail to treat it systematically was what drove him to leave public office and compile a rigorous, stage-by-stage account of how such fevers actually progress and how to treat each stage.

As a teenager, Ibn Sina reportedly cured the Samanid emir Nuh ibn Mansur of an illness the ruler's own court physicians had failed to treat. Instead of money, the young physician asked only for access to the Samanid royal library in Bukhara, one of the best-stocked in the Islamic world — and later wrote in his autobiography that reading freely through its books on every subject shaped the rest of his scholarly life.

Standard 17th-century smallpox treatment kept patients sealed in overheated rooms piled with blankets, on the theory that sweating out the 'poison' aided recovery — a practice that likely killed people the disease itself would have spared. Sydenham, after years of bedside observation, argued for the opposite: light bedding, cool rooms and moderate treatment. His 1666 findings, expanded into the Observationes Medicae of 1676, became a standard medical reference for two centuries.

Geneva Medical College's students were asked to vote on whether to admit a woman at all, and, by most accounts, approved Blackwell's application partly as a joke, assuming the request was itself a prank by a rival school. Blackwell arrived anyway, endured professors and townspeople who treated her as an inconvenience or a scandal, and graduated first in her class of 1849 — turning the 'joke' into a genuine medical degree.

Before leaving India, Joshi delivered a public address defending her decision to study medicine abroad despite fierce social and religious opposition, arguing India needed women physicians to treat women patients who could not, by custom, be examined by men. Queen Victoria sent her a message of congratulation on her 1886 graduation, and her thesis on obstetrics among Hindu women drew on the medical customs she had grown up inside. She returned to India to practice but died of tuberculosis within a year, before her degree ever became a long career.

Osler occasionally published anonymous hoax case reports under the invented name 'Egerton Yorrick Davis,' a fictional retired army surgeon. In 1884 he used the pseudonym to submit a fabricated, medically outlandish case to the Philadelphia Medical News, apparently to embarrass a colleague who had just published a self-important article — and the invented case was cited as genuine medical fact in journals for the next century before it was traced back to Osler's prank.