Physician Writer - 19th Century

19th Century

• Carl Ludwig Emil Aarestrup (1800–1856) Danish erotic poet
• Mariano Azuela (1873–1952) Mexican physician in Pancho Villa's army; in 1949 he received a National Prize for Literature
• Doris Bell Ball (1897–1987) wrote under the pseudonym "Josephine Bell"; a British detective novelist who wrote more than forty books; a founding member of the Crime Writers Association
• Pío Baroja y Nessi (1872–1956) Spanish writer, one of the key novelists of the Generation of '98; admired by Hemingway
• Nérée Beauchemin (1850–1931) Québécois poet who attempted to produce a national literature
• Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849) English poet and dramatist whose central theme was death
• Gottfried Benn (1886–1956) German essayist, novelist and expressionist poet
• Robert Seymour Bridges, OM, (1844–1930) English poet, the only physician to hold the honour of poet laureate (1913)
• Georg Büchner (1813–1837) German dramatist and writer of prose
• Ludwig Büchner (1824–1899) German philosopher and physiologist who became one of the exponents of 19th century scientific materialism
• Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) Russian novelist and playwright; author of The Master and Margarita
• Hans Carossa (1878–1956) German novelist and poet, known mostly for his autobiographical novels, and his innere Emigration (inner emigration) during the Nazi era.
• Louis-Ferdinand Céline pen name of French writer Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (1894–1961) developed a new style of writing that modernized both French and World literature
• Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) celebrated Russian short-story writer and playwright
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) British author of Sherlock Holmes fame
• Géza Csáth (né József Brenner) (1887–1919) Hungarian writer, playwright, musician, music critic and psychiatrist
• Warwick Deeping (1877–1950) prolific English novelist and short story writer; most famous novel is Sorrell and Son (1925)
• Júlio Dinis, pseudonym of Joaquim Guilherme Gomes Coelho (1839–1871) was a Portuguese doctor and writer.
• Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929).
• William Henry Drummond (1854–1907) Irish-Canadian poet of the habitant
• Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French author who, in 1920, published Confession de minuit featuring the anti-hero Salavin; in 1935, elected member of Académie française
• Havelock Ellis (1859–1940) British writer and poet, author of The Psychology of Sex
• Rudolph Fisher (1897–1934) African-American writer who was an active participant in the Harlem Renaissance, primarily as a novelist, but also as a musician
• R. Austin Freeman (1862–1943) British writer of detective stories, most featuring the medico-legal forensic investigator Dr Thorndyke. He invented the inverted detective story
• William Gilbert (author) (1804–1890) English author and father of W. S. Gilbert
• Oliver St. John Gogarty (1878–1957) Irish ear surgeon, one of the most prominent Dublin wits and best known as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan in James Joyce's novel Ulysses
• Enrique González Martínez (1871–1952) Mexican poet and diplomat, considered to be primarily Modernist in nature, with elements of French symbolism
• Thomas Gordon Hake (1809–1895) English poet, intimate member of the circle of friends and followers of Rossetti
• William Alexander Hammond (1828–1900) pioneering American neurologist and the Surgeon General of the United States Army during the American Civil War
• Henry Head (1861–1940) English neurologist who conducted pioneering studies on the somatosensory system and sensory nerves. Much of this work was conducted on himself, in collaboration with the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers
• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894) one of the best regarded American poets of the 19th century; helped found the literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly, his collected essays published as The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, highly popular in its day
• Richard Huelsenbeck (1892–1974) poet and a founder and historian of Dada.
• David H. Keller (1880–1966) (most often published as David H. Keller, MD, but also known by the pseudonyms Monk Smith, Matthew Smith, Amy Worth, Henry Cecil, Cecilia Henry and Jacobus Hubelaire); a writer for pulp magazines in the mid-20th century who wrote science fiction, fantasy and horror
• Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) English biographer, surgeon, scholar and bibliophile; younger brother of the economist John Maynard Keynes
• Janusz Korczak (1879–1942) Polish-Jewish pediatrician, hero of the Warsaw ghetto, and author of books for and about children
• F. Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803–1882) Estonian folklorist and poet who compiled the national epic poem Kalevipoeg
• Vincas Kudirka (1858–1899) Lithuanian poet and the author of both the music and lyrics of the Lithuanian National Anthem, Tautiška giesmė
• František Langer (1888–1965) Czech author, script writer, essayist, literary critic and publicist
• C. Louis Leipoldt (1880–1947) South African poet who wrote novels, plays, stories, children's books, cookbooks and a travel diary; numbered amongst the greatest of the Afrikaner poets
• Jorge de Lima (1895–1953) Brazilian politician, poet, and writer of Alagoas
• David Livingstone (1813–1873) Scottish medical missionary, explorer of Africa, travel writer
• Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910) Italian writer, wrote the science fiction book, L'Anno 3000
• W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) celebrated British novelist, short-story writer, and playwright; wrote Of Human Bondage
• John McCrae (1872–1918) Canadian poet, artist and soldier during World War I and a surgeon during the battle of Ypres; best known for writing the famous war memorial poem In Flanders Fields
• S. Weir Mitchell (1829–1914) prominent American neurologist who wrote short stories, poetry and more than a dozen novels (Hugh Wynne, Dr North, Characteristics), including the celebrated fictional story The Strange Case of George Dedlow.
• Mori Ōgai or Mori Rintaro (1862–1922) Japanese translator, novelist and poet; The Wild Geese is considered his major work; began as a writer of partly autobiographical fiction with strong overtones of German Romantic writings; midway in his career he shifted to historical novels
• Axel Martin Fredrik Munthe (1857–1949) Swedish psychiatrist, best known as the author of The Story of San Michele (1929), an autobiographical account of his work and life
• Max Simon Nordau (1849–1923) born Simon Maximilian Südfeld was a Hungarian Zionist leader, author, and social critic; co-founder of the World Zionist Organization
• Sir William Osler(1849–1919) Canadian-born; one of the greatest icons of medicine and described as the Father of Modern Medicine
• Philippe Panneton (pseudonym Ringuet) (1895–1960) Canadian academic, diplomat and writer
• Wilder Graves Penfield (1891–1976) a neurosurgeon who worked at McGill University and pioneered neurosurgical procedures for epilepsy; also wrote fiction
• Bozo Pericić (1865–1947) Croatian author of travel books, reviews on famous writers and a translation of Hamlet
• John William Polidori (1795–1821) Personal physician of Lord Byron and author of The Vampyre, the first vampire story in English
• Jose P. Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino polymath, nationalist and the most prominent advocate for reforms in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era; a polyglot conversant in at least ten languages, he was a prolific poet, essayist, diarist, correspondent, and novelist whose most famous works were his two novels, Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo
• Sir Ronald Ross (1857–1932) a "Renaissance man"; demonstrated the life cycle of the malarial parasite; made contributions in pure and epidemiologic mathematics, and wrote novels, plays and poetry
• Mokichi Saitō (1882–1953) Japanese poet of the Taishō period, a member of Araragi school; by the time of his death, he had written 17 collections of poems and 17,907 poems; family doctor of author Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and assisted in his suicide; novelist Kita Morio is his second son
• Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) Jewish-Austrian writer and dramatist. Stanley Kubrick's 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut is based on Schnitzler's Rhapsod; Schnitzler's La Ronde also spawned film versions.
• Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) German theologian, philosopher, organist, musicologist and medical missionary to Africa
• Victor Segalen (1878–1919) French ethnographer, archeologist, writer, poet, explorer, art-theorist, linguist, literary critic
• Henry Thompson, (1820–1904) indefatigable British polymath, scholar and novelist
• John Todhunter (1839–1916) Irish poet and playwright
• Saul Tschernichowsky (1875–1943) Jewish-Russian military physician during the First World War; decorated by the Russian government; nomadic life spent writing, translating, editing
• Adolfo Valderrama (1834–1902) Chilean man of letters and senator
• Vladislav Vančura (1891–1942) Czech author, scriptwriter and film director
• Frederik Willem van Eeden (1829–1901) started a literary periodical, founded an agricultural colony, translated Rabindranath Tagore's work into Dutch, and wrote social and literary treatises in addition to fiction, poetry, and plays
• Ernst Weiß (1882–1940) Jewish-Austrian writer, friend of Kafka, died by his own hand in Paris in 1940 as the Nazis entered the city
• William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright and essayist; in 1963 he won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for poetry
• Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986) Jewish-German psychoanalyst, she is one of the few scientifically trained people to have seriously investigated the diagnostic significance of the hand; Studies in Handreading was published in 1936
• Francis Brett Young (1884–1954) English novelist and poet