The Doctor (The Brain of Morbius)

Eight incarnations of the Doctor before the First Doctor were seen during the Fourth Doctor's mindbending contest with Morbius before the mechanism broke down. (TV: The Brain of Morbius, PROSE: Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius, PROSE: Cold Fusion, AUDIO: Cold Fusion)

When describing his "renewal" process to Ben and Polly, the newly-regenerated Second Doctor implied that he might have previously renewed himself in the past, and he opened a trunk that contained relics from his previous incarnations: Saladin's ornamental dagger; a large earring he used to wear; a solid gold-like thick bracelet with odd pictures; and Cameca's jade brooch.(PROSE: The Power of The Daleks) When Polly, Ben, and Jamie found a shaving mirror on the control console of the second control room in the Doctor's TARDIS, Polly and Ben speculated that the room may have been used by a bearded incarnation of the Doctor from a time before either of the Doctors they were familiar with. (PROSE: Something at the Door)

The Fourth Doctor told Romana, possibly in jest, that Time Lords had 90 lives and he had lived through about 130. (TV: The Creature from the Pit) The Eleventh Doctor told Clyde Langer that he could change 507 times. (TV: Death of the Doctor)

When the Seventh Doctor transformed himself into a human named John Smith, he removed almost all of his memories, although he was unable to remove the ones from before he was born. "Verity" kept these memories out of John Smith's head. (PROSE: Human Nature)

Behind the scenes

 * Many other stories would would suggest that William Hartnell's Doctor was, in fact, the earliest. (TV: The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, The Time of the Doctor, et al) The novel Lungbarrow proposed a possible solution for this contradiction: following persecution from Rassilon, a Time Lord founder threw himself into a Loom to be resurrected, and the Doctor had many of his memories; this would suggest that the faces in the mindbending contest belonged to this founder rather than the Doctor himself, though this was only hinted and not explicitly stated in the novel.
 * The original rehearsal script by David Whitaker for TV: The Power of the Daleks (then known as The Destiny of Doctor Who) stated that the Doctor renewed before, and that last time, he was wearing a metal bracelet stored in a drawer of the console. This bracelet was described in John Peel's novelisation of the serial. (DWMSE 4)
 * Philip Hinchcliffe, producer of TV: The Brain of Morbius and himself one of the faces, said on the faces: "We tried to get famous actors for the faces of the Doctor. But because no one would volunteer, we had to use backroom boys. And it is true to say that I attempted to imply that William Hartnell was not the first Doctor." They all wore stock costumes. (REF: In-Vision #12: The Brain of Morbius, A History of the Universe) In A Day with Philip Hinchcliffe, Hinchcliffe reconfirmed this original intention and, while noting that many fans tried to say that the faces were Morbius' rather than the Doctor's (a claim repeated in Doctor Who The Handbook: The Fourth Doctor), he was certain that he had played the Doctor.
 * Script-editor and uncredited co-writer Robert Holmes, as well as one of the faces, confirmed Hincliffe's account: "We don't know which one Hartnell was, whether he was the first or not. In the phantasmagoric scene where they are mind-wrestling, we see the Doctor forced back through a number of regenerations." (REF: In-Vision #12: The Brain of Morbius) He would later introduce the idea of a twelve regeneration limit in TV: The Deadly Assassin. Assuming that the last face shown was the true first incarnation of the Doctor, that would have meant that the Fifth Doctor had no regenerations left; in Holmes' story TV: The Caves of Androzani, the Fifth Doctor said before his regeneration, "Is this death?" and "It feels different this time."
 * The faces included directors Christopher Barry and Douglas Camfield, script editor Robert Holmes, production unit manager George Gallaccio, producer Philip Hinchcliffe, writer Robert Banks Stewart, and production assistants Chris Baker and Graeme Harper.
 * Lance Parkin, author of the novel Cold Fusion, confirmed that Patience's newly-regenerated husband was intended to specifically be the Douglas Camfield Doctor (REF: AHistory); in an earlier draft of the novel The Infinity Doctors, Patience's husband would have been the Robert Banks Stewart Doctor.