Episode 100! Celebrating the Top All-Time Heroes in Medicine

This week’s episode of the PW Podcast is celebratory, in honor of our 100th episode. This has been a fantastic adventure, and we have been honored to interview more than 150 health practitioners to date, exposed to so much fantastic clinical science and expertise! We need to thank all our guests, as well as our regular contributors, Dr. Medlaw and Dr. Alex McDonald. This is an opportunity to also thank our sound guys at The Audio and the great staff at Physician’s Weekly. But we would especially like to thank you, the listeners!

To celebrate this milestone, Dr. Alex McDonald (Physician’s Weekly Editorial Board Member and family/sports medicine physician at Southern California Permanente Medical Group) and PW Podcast host Rachel Giles, MD, generated a list of their “Heroes of Medicine,” which they discuss in this episode; this list reflects their personal choices and just scrapes the surface. We would love to hear your suggestions of who was missed! 

Enjoy Listening!

Heroes of Medicine:

1. Hippocrates promoted the idea that gods did not cast illnesses
2. Edward Jenner: 1796, first vaccine à small pox
3. Watson and Crick (and Rosalind Franklin): 1953 - DNA
4. Louis Pasteur: 1864, microorganisms in the air and water
5. Alexander Fleming: 1928, antibiotics
6. Ignaz Semmelweiss: 1846, handwashing, and no one believed him!
7. Harold Varmus: open access publishing (Public Library of Science, PLoS)
8. James Lind: first clinical trial, he was a ship's surgeon in the Royal Navy. While at sea in May 1747, Lind provided some crew members with two oranges and one lemon, proving scurvy could be prevented by citrus
9. Jennifer Doudna: 2006, CRISPR gene editing
10. Mary Claire King: 1989, not for discovery of breast cancer gene but for her humanitarian work performing pro bono sequencing of children “lost” in the dictatorship of Argentina and placing them back with their families
11. Peter Ratcliffe, Bill Kaelin, Greg Semenza: 2019, Nobel prize - hypoxia signaling
12. Elizabeth Blackwell: 1849, became the first woman in America to receive an MD. She was soon joined by her younger sister, and together, the Blackwells founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women.
13. Paul Farmer: with colleagues, pioneered novel, community-based treatment strategies that demonstrate the delivery of high-quality healthcare in resource-poor settings. He wrote extensively on health, human rights, and the consequences of social inequality.

Let us know what you thought of this week’s episode on Twitter: @physicianswkly

Want to share your medical expertise, research, or unique experience in medicine on the PW podcast? Email us at editorial@physweekly.com!

Thanks for listening!