← Fame through time1800-1899
The 19th century
Whose names filled the books of the 19th century - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in Chinese books during the 19th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Zhu Xi870 - 2
Li Hongzhang149 - 3
Zhang Zhidong86 - 4
Zuo Zongtang43 - 5
Ban Gu40 - 6
Ge Hong40 - 7Chen Shou14
- 8
Mao Zedong12 - 9
Lu Xun11
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 19th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Sigmund Freud12 decades - 2
Robert Koch14 decades - 3
Ignaz Semmelweis6 decades - 4
L. L. Zamenhofnot measured- - 5
Paul Ehrlich13 decades - 6
Joseph Lister18 decades - 7
Rudolf Virchow16 decades - 8
Cesare Lombroso16 decades - 9
Jean-Martin Charcot4 decades - 10
Alois Alzheimer3 decades - 11
Emil von Behring11 decades - 12
Elizabeth Blackwell17 decades - 13
Anandi Gopal Joshinot measured- - 14
John Snow21 decades - 15
Vladimir Bekhterev5 decades - 16
René Laennec0 decades - 17
Camillo Golgi15 decades - 18
Havelock Ellis14 decades - 19
Ronald Ross13 decades - 20
Doc Holliday8 decades - 21
John Harvey Kellogg5 decades - 22
William Osler14 decades - 23
John Langdon Down0 decades - 24
James Barry22 decades - 25
William Walkernot measured-
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.