A century of IBD drugs. Part 1: the people behind the discoveries. It starts with a post-mortem. London, 1859. Samuel Wilks calls it ulcerative colitis. It was probably Crohn's. Then half a century of a handful of drugs. Sulfasalazine. Steroids. 5-ASA. Thiopurines. Ciclosporin. The first randomised trial in IBD? Cortisone v placebo, Oxford, 1955. Then 1993. Sander van Deventer and his team in Amsterdam give Jan Vilček's anti-TNF antibody in Crohn's for the first time. Infliximab. Everything changes. After that, gut-only vedolizumab, IL-23, JAK inhibitors. But this is really about the people. • Nanna Svartz, Sweden's first woman professor of medicine, designed sulfasalazine. • Gertrude Elion made 6-mercaptopurine and won a Nobel Prize. • Azad Khan, from Bangladesh, showed which half of sulfasalazine actually works. • Andrew Lazarovits made the antibody that became vedolizumab and died at 43, long before it was licensed. • Brian Feagan gave the very first dose of vedolizumab, in London, Ontario, and led the trials from phase 2 to GEMINI 1. He died last November. • Stephan Targan led the first big infliximab trial, then tied TL1A to gut inflammation. We should not forget them. Who did I miss? Part 2 soon: the trials that taught us how to use them.