1500–1800

• 1543 – Andreas Vesalius publishes De Fabrica Corporis Humani which corrects Greek medical errors and revolutionizes European medicine
• 1546 – Girolamo Fracastoro proposes that epidemic diseases are caused by transferable seedlike entities
• 1553 – Miguel Serveto describes the circulation of blood through the lungs. He is accused of heresy and burned at the stake
• 1556 – Amato Lusitano describes venous valves in the Ázigos vein
• 1559 – Realdo Colombo describes the circulation of blood through the lungs in detail
• 1563 – Garcia de Orta founds tropical medicine with his treatise on Indian diseases and treatments
• 1596 – Li Shizhen publishes Běncǎo Gāngmù or Compendium of Materia Medica
• 1603 – Girolamo Fabrici studies leg veins and notices that they have valves which allow blood to flow only toward the heart
• 1628 – William Harvey explains the circulatory system in Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus
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1701 – Giacomo Pylarini gives the first smallpox innoculations in Europe. They were widely practised in the east before then.

• 1736 – Claudius Aymand performs the first successful appendectomy
• 1747 – James Lind discovers that citrus fruits prevent scurvy
• 1774 – Joseph Priestley discovers nitrous oxide, nitric oxide, ammonia, hydrogen chloride and oxygen
• 1785 – William Withering publishes "An Account of the Foxglove" the first systematic description of digitalis in treating dropsy
• 1790 – Samuel Hahnemann rages against the prevalent practice of bloodletting as a universal cure and founds homeopathy
• 1796 – Edward Jenner develops a smallpox vaccination method
• 1799 – Humphry Davy discovers the anesthetic properties of nitrous oxide