The article discusses the criteria that should be used by researchers who include individuals among the ranks of historically significant people and dedicate biographical articles to them in encyclopedias, monographs and doctoral research. It is shown that in the history of domestic clinical medicine, prominent physicians with equivalent standing in the second half of the 19th century – E.E. Eiсhwald (Saint Petersburg), K.M. Pavlinov and M.P. Cherinov (Moscow), N.A. Vinogradov (Kazan) and F.F. Mering (Kiev) – have not received equal coverage in historical medical literature