Famous Chinese Physicians

Chinese ophthalmologist Li Wenliang was one of the first to identify the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan. In late 2019, he alerted his colleagues of an illness that resembled SARS but didn’t respond to usual treatment. He was reprimanded and later died of COVID-19. He is since regarded as a medical hero.

Wong Fei-hung was a Chinese physician, martial artist, and folk hero. Wong is the subject of many television series and films. Between the 1940s and 1980s, Wong was portrayed by Hong Kong actor Kwan Tak-hing in over 70 films which earned Kwan the nickname Master Wong. Wong was also played by Jet Li in Once Upon a Time in China.

Born to a Chinese father and a Belgian mother in China, Han Suyin initially studied medicine and also worked as a midwife. During her medical practice in Hong Kong, she was in a relationship with a married Australian war reporter, which was the basis of her iconic novel A Many-Splendoured Thing.

Chinese pharmacologist and scholar of the Ming dynasty Li Shizhen is remembered for his elaborate compilation Compendium of Materia Medica, which offered descriptions of over 1,000 drugs and provided instructions for about 11,000 prescriptions. His book was a benchmark in Chinese medicine and was translated into several languages.

Han dynasty physician and inventor Zhang Zhongjing, also known as The Chinese Hippocrates, is remembered for his iconic treatise on the medical practice of his time, Treatise on Febrile and Other Diseases, which later greatly influenced the methods of Chinese traditional medicine. He specialized in the study of typhoid fever.