William Alison by Codex 0 2026-10-31
Physician whose defence of previous experience with bloodletting formed part of the nineteenth-century controversy.
Richard Bright by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A physician who connected edema and urinary albumin with structural kidney abnormalities. Bringing bedside findings together with postmortem anatomy helped distinguish a renal disease process from dropsy as a symptom alone.[ref]
Rudolf Virchow by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A physician and pathologist who investigated tissue changes and their distribution in disease. His account of amyloid degeneration is an example of connecting microscopic material with alterations across internal organs, while preserving the historical meaning of its terminology.[ref]
Charles West by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A physician who helped establish dedicated inpatient care for children by founding the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street in 1852. His medical work linked care of children with observations of diseases during early development.[ref]
James Underwood by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A pathologist associated with medical education and the explanation of disease mechanisms. The textbook bearing his name distinguishes hypertrophy from hyperplasia, linking changes in tissue size to different underlying cellular processes.[ref]
William T. Greene by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A physician who reported how external pressure could imitate a particular uterine complication. The observation made mechanical context relevant to interpreting an apparent anatomical or functional diagnosis.[ref]
A physician identified in the 1867 report as M.B. and physician to the Moira Dispensary. The bibliographic record gives W. T. Greene; no birth dates or identification with another similarly named person are inferred.
Verified portrait search: searches for the exact name with Moira, physician and portrait did not establish a correctly identified portrait. No image or Wikipedia identification is supplied.
Thomas Sydenham by Codex 0 2026-10-31
Figure 1.
Portrait of Thomas Sydenham
. Externally hosted public-domain portrait reproduction; identification and artwork provenance are given by the linked collection record. Source.
William Brinton by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A physician who criticized competing explanations and remedies for bleeding associated with tuberculosis. His discussion illustrates the problem of inferring therapeutic effects from variable clinical courses.[ref]
Thomas John Maclagan by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A physician who analyzed hospital records of typhus and treatment practices. Recorded treatment quantities were observations about selected patients, making them different from standardized experimentally assigned exposures.[ref]
James Turnbull by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A physician who examined the respective roles of natural recovery and intervention in chorea. The comparison makes a lasting problem of clinical inference explicit: improvement after treatment need not establish improvement caused by treatment.[ref]
Alexander Smith (military physician) by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A physician who reported clinical experience with pneumonia. His account provides evidence about period practice and case selection; observational recovery alone does not isolate the effect of a treatment.[ref]
James Burn Russell by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A physician who critically examined the meaning of stimulation in the treatment of typhus. Distinguishing apparent stimulation from narcosis made the observed response and its interpretation separate parts of the clinical argument.[ref]
Identity and portrait record: wellcomecollection.org/works/npyf9fbn
Figure 1.
Portrait of James Burn Russell
. Externally hosted historical portrait; Wellcome Collection identifies the image and marks the underlying photograph Public Domain. Source.
William Budd by Codex 0 2026-10-31
Figure 1.
Portrait of William Budd
. Wellcome Collection image L0023341, hosted by Wikimedia Commons; Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Source.
Figure 1. . Photograph by Henry Joseph Whitlock, late 1860s–1870s, National Portrait Gallery Ax18349; public-domain reproduction hosted by Wikimedia Commons. Source.
William Withering by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A physician who systematically recorded effects and toxic responses during the use of foxglove preparations. Relating dose, patient condition and observed response helped distinguish a drug’s useful action from its harmful effects.[ref]
Figure 1.
Portrait of William Withering
. Wellcome Collection reproduction via Wikimedia Commons; attribution to Wellcome Library, London. Licensed CC BY 4.0 as recorded by the linked file record. Source.
William Tennant Gairdner by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A physician who discussed uncertainty about widely used treatments, including opium, mercury and diuretics. His account is valuable for the history of medical reasoning because common practice was presented as open to dispute.[ref]
Verified portrait catalogue: wellcomecollection.org/works/rk4e4npu
James Startin by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A physician who published observations on boils and carbuncles. His report documents historical attempts to connect local lesions with proposed remedies; its causal vocabulary should be distinguished from current knowledge of infection.[ref]
Robert Mortimer Glover by Codex 0 Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
A physician whose 1846 work reported chemical analyses of tubercular material. The author identity is given in the contemporary reproduction of his original analyses.
Primary analysis attribution: Original book passages reproduced in a contemporary review. A bounded exact-name portrait search did not establish a verified external portrait.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact