Famous Physicians from Germany

Albert Schweitzer (January 14, 1875 – September 4, 1965) was an Alsatian polymath. He served as a theologian, organist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. As a Lutheran, Schweitzer questioned both the secular view of Jesus from the historical-critical method and traditional Christian views. His work on interpreting Pauline Christianity focused on Paul's mysticism of "being in Christ" as primary and Justification by Faith as secondary. He earned the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of "Reverence."

Josef Mengele (16 March 1911 – 7 February 1979), also called the Angel of Death (German: Todesengel) and the White Angel (German: der Weisse Engel), served as a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician at Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. He conducted deadly human experiments on prisoners. Mengele was part of the doctor team that chose victims for the gas chambers. Those deemed unfit for work went to the gas chambers for killing.

Martin Luther (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546), a German professor of theology, composer, priest, monk, and a key figure in the Protestant Reformation, was ordained to the priesthood in 1507. Luther rejected several Roman Catholic Church teachings and practices, specifically disputing the view on indulgences. In his Ninety-five Theses of 1517, Luther suggested an academic discussion of indulgences' practice and effectiveness. He refused to withdraw all his writings when Pope Leo X demanded it in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor.

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (November 10, 1759 – May 9, 1805) was a German poet, philosopher, physician, historian, and playwright. During his final seventeen years (1788–1805), Schiller built a productive, though complex, friendship with the already famous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They often talked about aesthetics. Schiller pushed Goethe to finish works he left as sketches. This connection and those talks created a period now called Weimar Classicism.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (; German: [aˈgʀɪpa]; September 14, 1486 – February 18, 1535) was a German polymath. He acted as a physician, legal scholar, soldier, theologian, and occult writer.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (German: [ˈɡeːɔɐ̯k ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈheːɡl̩]); he lived August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831. He was a German philosopher and an important figure in German idealism. He gained wide recognition then. Though he shaped continental philosophy, he gained influence in analytic thought too. People divide on Hegel, but everyone accepts his place in Western philosophy. Hegel's main work developed a unique idea of idealism.

Albertus Magnus (before 1200 – November 15, 1280), also called Saint Albert the Great and Albert of Cologne, was a German Catholic Dominican friar and bishop. The Catholic Church canonized him as a saint. During his life, he was known as Doctor universalis and Doctor expertus; later, the name Magnus was added to him. Scholars like James A. Weisheipl and Joachim R. Söder call him the greatest German philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages. The Catholic Church counts him among the 36 Doctors of the Church.

Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (German: [ˈhaːnəman]); he was a German physician. He is best known for creating homeopathy, a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine. He lived from April 10, 1755, to July 2, 1843.

Magnus Hirschfeld (14 May 1868 – 14 May 1935) was a German physician and sexologist. He studied medicine and sexology mainly in Germany. Hirschfeld practiced in Berlin-Charlottenburg during the Weimar period. He openly supported sexual minorities and founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. Historian Dustin Goltz said this group 'carried out the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights.' Hirschfeld's radical ideas shifted how Germans viewed sexuality. Right-wing groups attacked Hirschfeld because he was Jewish and gay; völkisch activists beat him up.

Karl Franz Gebhardt (23 November 1897 – 2 June 1948) was a German medical doctor and a war criminal in World War II. He served as Medical Superintendent of the Hohenlychen Sanatorium. He acted as Consulting Surgeon for the Waffen-SS and Chief Surgeon in the Staff of the Reich Physician SS and Police. He was also Heinrich Himmler's personal physician. Gebhardt mainly coordinated surgical tests on inmates at the Ravensbrück and Auschwitz concentration camps. These tests aimed to test his method for surgically managing severely contaminated traumatic wounds.

Karl Brandt (January 8, 1904 – June 2, 1948) served as a German physician and Schutzstaffel (SS) officer in Nazi Germany. Brandt trained in surgery. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932. In August 1934, Brandt became Adolf Hitler's escort doctor. Brandt was part of Hitler's inner circle at the Berghof. Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler's Chancellery, selected Brandt to manage the Aktion T4 euthanasia program. Brandt later became the Reich Commissioner of Sanitation and Health (Bevollmächtigter für das Sanitäts- und Gesundheitswesen). People accused Brandt of involvement in human experimentation and other war crimes.

Herta Oberheuser (May 15, 1911, Cologne, German Empire – January 24, 1978, Linz am Rhein, West Germany) was a Nazi physician and a war criminal. She worked at the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps from 1940 through 1943.

Gerhard August Heinrich Rose (November 30, 1896, Danzig – January 13, 1992, Obernkirchen) was a German expert in tropical medicine. Rose took part in Nazi human experimentation at Dachau and Buchenwald. He spread malaria and typhus to Jews, Romani people, and the mentally ill. A life sentence was given to him, but he was released in 1953.

Viktor Hermann Brack (November 9, 1904 – June 2, 1948) was a German Nazi war criminal. Brack organized the euthanasia program Action T4, where the Nazi state murdered over 70,000 disabled German and Austrian people. Brack helped gas Jews in extermination camps. He conferred with Odilo Globocnik about carrying out the Final Solution. Brack faced a death sentence in 1947 and was executed by hanging in 1948. He joined the Nazi Party and Schutzstaffel (SS) from a middle-class family.

Joachim Mrugowsky (August 15, 1905, Rathenow, Brandenburg – June 2, 1948, Landsberg Prison, Landsberg am Lech) was a German hygienist. Mrugowsky held roles as Associate Professor, Medical Doctorate, Chief of Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS, Senior Hygienist at the Reich, SS-Physician, and SS and Waffen-SS Colonel. The Doctors' Trial found Mrugowsky guilty of war crimes after the war, and he was executed in 1948.

Wolfram Sievers (July 10, 1905 – June 2, 1948) managed the Ahnenerbe as Reichsgeschäftsführer from 1935 to 1945.

Fritz Ernst Fischer (October 5, 1912 – 2003) was a German medical doctor. Under the Nazi regime, Fischer took part in medical experiments on Ravensbrück concentration camp inmates. Fischer was born in Berlin. He studied medicine in Bonn, then Berlin and Leipzig. He graduated in Hamburg in 1938. Fischer joined the SS in 1934, reaching the rank of Sturmbannführer (major). He joined the NSDAP in June 1937. On November 1, 1939, he served as a physician and SS Second Lieutenant at the Waffen-SS SS-Department of the Hohenlychen Sanatorium.

Karl August Genzken, born June 8, 1885 in Preetz, Schleswig-Holstein, Prussia, became a Nazi physician. He conducted human experiments on prisoners at several concentration camps. Genzken held the rank of Gruppenführer (Major General) in the Waffen-SS and served as the Chief of the Medical Office of the Waffen-SS. The Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg tried Genzken as a war criminal.

Frederick Albert Cook, who lived from June 10, 1865, to August 5, 1940, was an American explorer, physician, and ethnographer. Cook claimed to reach the North Pole on April 21, 1908. This date was nearly a year before Robert Peary reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909. Many people disputed both men's accounts for years. Cook's expedition found Meighen Island, the only island in the North American Arctic found by a United States expedition. A University of Copenhagen commission ruled Cook's claim unproven in December 1909 after reviewing his limited records. The commission ruled this in 1911.

Monika Stolz was born March 24, 1951. She is a German politician for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Baden-Württemberg. Stolz served as the Minister of Work, Social Order, Women and the Elderly from 2006 to 2011.

Maria Furtwängler-Burda was born September 13, 1966. She is a German physician and a television actress.

Werner Theodor Otto Forßmann (Forssmann in English; 29 August 1904 – 1 June 1979) was a German physician. He shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Medicine (with Andre Frederic Cournand and Dickinson W. Richards) for creating a procedure for cardiac catheterization. In 1929, Forßmann used local anesthesia and inserted a catheter into his arm vein. He risked his life, not knowing if the catheter would pierce a vein. Forssmann succeeded; he safely passed the catheter into his heart.

Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch, a German physician and microbiologist (English: ; German: [kʰɔχ]; 11 December 1843 – 27 May 1910), helped found modern bacteriology. Koch identified the specific causes of tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax. He also gave experimental backing to the idea of infectious disease, conducting experiments on humans and animals. Koch created and improved lab technologies and techniques in microbiology. He made key discoveries in public health. His research led to Koch's postulates, a set of four requirements.

Kurt Blome (January 31, 1894, Bielefeld, Westphalia – October 10, 1969) became a high-ranking Nazi scientist during and before World War II. He served as the Deputy Reich Health Leader (Reichsgesundheitsführer) and Plenipotentiary for Cancer Research in the Reich Research Council. In his autobiography, Arzt im Kampf (A Physician's Struggle), Blome set medical and military power against each other in their fight for life and death. The Doctors' Trial tried Blome in 1947 for practicing euthanasia and conducting human experiments. He admitted only that an order in 1943 told him to experiment with plague.

Josef M. Issels (November 21, 1907 – February 11, 1998) was a German physician who promoted the Issels treatment, an alternative cancer therapy. He claimed his methods cured cancer patients conventional treatments could not fix. His methods caused controversy. In 1961, Issels faced fraud and manslaughter charges for promising fake cancer cures and for patients who died after refusing standard treatment. A 1964 ruling overturned the initial manslaughter conviction on the grounds.

Helmut Poppendick (January 6, 1902 – January 11, 1994) was a German doctor who served in the SS during World War II. He worked as an internist and served in the Medical Doctorate. He became Chief of the Personal Staff of the Reich Physician SS and Police. After the war, Poppendick faced the Doctors' Trial. He studied medicine from 1919 to 1926 in Göttingen, Munich, and Berlin. Poppendick earned his medical license on February 1, 1928. He worked for four years as a clinical assistant at the First Medical Clinic of Charité in Berlin. From June 1933 to October 1934, he served as the ass.

Dorothea Christiane Erxleben née Leporin (November 13, 1715, Quedlinburg – June 13, 1762 in Quedlinburg) was the first female medical doctor in Germany.

Paul Rostock (January 18, 1892 – June 17, 1956) was a German official, surgeon, and university professor. He acted as Chief of the Office for Medical Science and Research (Amtschef der Dienststelle Medizinische Wissenschaft und Forschung) under Third Reich Commissioner Karl Brandt. Rostock was also a Full Professor, holding a Medical Doctorate and Medical Superintendent of the University of Berlin Surgical Clinic. Rostock was born in Kranz, Meseritz district, German Empire. He studied medicine in Greifswald and finished his medical doctorate at Jena in 1921. He got his medical license and interned at the Univer

Baron Sir Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich von Mueller (German: Müller) (June 30, 1825 – October 10, 1896) was a German-Australian physician, geographer, and a botanist. Governor Charles La Trobe appointed him government botanist for the colony of Victoria in 1853. Mueller later directed the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne. He also founded the National Herbarium of Victoria. Mueller named many Australian plants.

Hildegard of Bingen (German: Hildegard von Bingen; Latin: Hildegardis Bingensis; 1098 – 17 September 1179), known as Saint Hildegard and the Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, and polymath. Many in Europe consider her the founder of scientific natural history in Germany. Fellow nuns elected her magistra in 1136. She founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. Her work, the Ordo Virtutum, shows an early example of liturgical drama.

Otto Fritz Meyerhof (April 12, 1884 – October 6, 1951) was a German physician and biochemist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1922.

Samuel Mitja Rapoport (27 November 1912 – 7 July 2004) was a Russian-born German university professor of biochemistry in East Germany. He was of Jewish descent and a committed communist. He fled Austria for the United States after the annexation. In 1950, an investigation into un-American activities led to an offer for a professorship in East Berlin. He married the pediatrician Ingeborg Rapoport.

René Joachim Henri Dutrochet (14 November 1776 – 4 February 1847) was a French physician, botanist, and physiologist. He gained fame for his study of osmosis.

Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow (13 October 1821 – 5 September 1902) was a German physician, anthropologist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist, writer, editor, and politician. He is known as "the father of modern pathology" and the founder of social medicine, earning the title "Pope of medicine." He received the Copley Medal in 1892. He was a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, but he refused the title "von Virchow." Virchow studied medicine at the Friedrich-Wil...

Carl Austin Weiss Sr. (December 6, 1906 – September 8, 1935) was an American physician from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was implicated in the assassination of U.S. Senator Huey Long at the Louisiana State Capitol on September 8, 1935.

Johann Karl Ernst Dieffenbach (27 January 1811 – 1 October 1855), also known as Ernest Dieffenbach, was a German physician, geologist, and naturalist. He became the first trained scientist to live and work in New Zealand. He traveled widely under the New Zealand Company's direction, returning in 1841–42. He published his Travels in New Zealand in English in 1843. Dieffenbach was born in Giessen. He earned a degree at the university of Giessen. Authorities in the Grand Duchy of Hesse accused him of being subversive, causing him to flee first to Zurich, where he obtained a medical degree.

Johann Friedrich Gustav von Eschscholtz (November 1, 1793 – May 7, 1831) was a Baltic German physician, naturalist, and entomologist. He explored the Pacific region early on, collecting flora and fauna in Alaska, California, and Hawaii.

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (August 31, 1821 – September 8, 1894) was a German physician and physicist. He made major contributions across several scientific fields. The Helmholtz Association, the largest German research institution, bears his name. In physiology and psychology, he developed mathematics for the eye, theories on vision, ideas about how space and color are perceived, and research into sound perception and sensory experience. In physics, he presented theories on energy conservation.

Gunther von Hagens, born Gunther Gerhard Liebchen on January 10, 1945, is a German anatomist. He invented plastination, the method for preserving biological tissue specimens. He organized many Body Worlds public exhibitions and live demonstrations by him and his colleagues. He traveled globally to show the educational value of this work. Sourcing biological specimens for his exhibits caused controversy. However, he states informed consent occurred before donor death, and detailed documentation exists.

Angelus Silesius (c. 1624 – July 9, 1677), born Johann Scheffler, was a German Catholic priest and physician. He became known as a mystic and religious poet. He was raised Lutheran. He adopted the name Angelus (Latin for 'angel' or 'heavenly messenger') and the epithet Silesius ('Silesian') after converting to Catholicism in 1653. While studying in the Netherlands, he read medieval mystic works. He learned about the German mystic Jacob Böhme through Böhme's friend, Abraham von Franckenberg. Silesius's mystical beliefs cause

Baron Carl von Rokitansky (German: Carl Freiherr von Rokitansky, Czech: Karel Rokytanský) (February 19, 1804 – July 23, 1878) was a Bohemian Physician, Pathologist, humanist philosopher, and liberal politician.

Ernst Wilhelm Ritter von Brücke (July 6, 1819 – January 7, 1892) was a German physician and physiologist. He made contributions in many areas of physiology.

Heinrich Christian Friedrich Schumacher (November 15, 1757 in Glückstadt, Holstein – December 9, 1830) was a Danish surgeon, botanist, and anatomy professor at the University of Copenhagen. Schumacher conducted major research on malacology, which means molluscs, and named many taxa systematically.

Johann Bartsch (1709, Königsberg – 1738, Suriname) was a German physician. He graduated from Leiden University in the Netherlands in 1737. He published only one work: *Thesis de Calore Corporis Humani hygraulico*. Bartsch strongly favored botany. This interest made him seek Carl Linnaeus's society. Linnaeus visited Boerhaave at Leiden for a year. Forty-seven letters from Bartsch to Linnaeus, spanning 1736 and 1737, survive. Bartsch helped Linnaeus publish *Flora Lapponica*. Linnaeus asked for Bartsch's help, though Linnaeus had to refuse the offer himself.

Rudolf Hilferding (10 August 1877 – 11 February 1941) was an Austrian-born Marxist economist, leading socialist theorist, politician, and chief theoretician for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) during the Weimar Republic. He was recognized almost universally as the SPD's foremost theoretician of his century and a physician. He was born in Vienna, where he earned his doctorate after studying medicine. Hilferding became a leading journalist for the SPD. He joined the November Revolution in Germany. He served as Finance Minister of Germany in 1923 and from 1928 to 1929. In 1933, he fled into e

John Kingsley Lattimer, MD (October 14, 1914 in Mount Clemens, Michigan – May 10, 2007 in Teaneck, New Jersey), was a urologist. He conducted extensive research on the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations. Lattimer became the first medical specialist not linked to the United States government to examine medical evidence for the John F. Kennedy assassination. Dr. Lattimer studied at Columbia University. He became the urologist-in-chief of Presbyterian Hospital and chairman of the urology department at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University for 25 years. He wrote 375 pape

Paul Fleming, also spelt Flemming (October 5, 1609 – April 2, 1640), was a German physician and poet. Fleming wrote notable verse and hymns. He spent several years accompanying the Duke of Holstein's embassies to Russia and Persia. Fleming also lived for a year at Reval on the coast of Estonia, where he wrote many love-songs.

Majid Samii (Persian: مجید سمیعی‎, born 19 June 1937) is a respected Iranian neurosurgeon and medical scientist.

Augustus Quirinus Rivinus (9 December 1652 – 20 December 1723), also known as August Bachmann or A. Q. Bachmann, was a German physician and botanist. Rivinus helped develop better methods for classifying plants.

Friedrich Trendelenburg (born 24 May 1844, died 15 December 1924) was a German surgeon. He was the son of philosopher Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg. He fathered pharmacologist Paul Trendelenburg and was the grandfather of pharmacologist Ullrich Georg Trendelenburg. Trendelenburg began life in Berlin. He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh. He finished his studies at the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Bernhard von Langenbeck guided him. He earned his doctorate in 1866. Trendelenburg practiced medicine at the University of Rostock and the University of Bonn. In 1895, he became