This article traces the contribution of Polish scientists and physicians to the development of world medicine, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Beginning with Wojciech Oczko’s pioneering work in balneology and health education, the paper follows a line of researchers whose discoveries reshaped clinical practice and public health well beyond Poland’s borders. Among them are Ignacy Łukasiewicz, whose kerosene lamp enabled the first documented night-time surgery; Napoleon Cybulski, discoverer of adrenaline; Ludwik Hirszfeld, co-creator of the ABO blood-group system; Rudolf Weigl, inventor of an effective typhus vaccine; Marie Skłodowska-Curie, twice a Nobel laureate and pioneer of radiotherapy; and Hilary Koprowski and Albert Sabin, whose oral polio vaccines saved millions of children worldwide. The article argues that Polish medicine’s contribution to global science is not a series of isolated episodes, but a continuous tradition, repeatedly obscured by partition, war, emigration, and what may be called the “dispersal of scientific identity”: the tendency of international scholarship to detach a researcher’s achievements from their national origin. Drawing on the Talmudic principle that whoever saves one life saves the entire world, the paper situates these biographies within a broader reflection on memory, identity, and the ethics of medical science.