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Better known as Dr. Death in popular media, South African cardiologist Wouter Basson is infamous for being involved in the apartheid-era Project Coast, a chemical and biological weapons program targeted toward the Blacks. It is believed he continues to practice medicine for Mediclinic near Cape Town.
Hamilton Naki was a laboratory assistant who worked alongside cardiac surgeon Christiaan Barnard in South Africa. Despite not having a formal medical education, he was known for his dexterity with surgical equipment and his ability to teach medical students. Some sources claim he participated in the world's first human-to-human heart transplantation in 1967.
South African psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe, a leading figure in behaviour therapy, is noted for his reciprocal inhibition methods, especially for developing systematic desensitization. He also developed Subjective Units of Disturbance Scale and created Fear Survey Plan and Subjective Anxiety Scale. He was ranked as the 53rd most-cited psychologist of the twentieth-century in a 2002 survey of Review of General Psychology.
Max Theiler was a South African-American virologist and physician. After getting his medical degree in South Africa, he went on to earn a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene in London. During his career, he developed a vaccine against yellow fever, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1951.
South African pediatric cardiologist and professor Lungile Pepeta is remembered for his life-long struggle to improve his country’s medical facilities and to create a medical school for doctors from rural areas. Part of the advisory committee of the government’s COVID-19 taskforce, he himself died of the virus later.
