Medical image classification has played an important role in the medical field, and the related method based on deep learning has become an important and powerful technique in medical image classification. In this article, we propose a simplified inception module based Hadamard attention (SI + HA) mechanism for medical image classification. Specifically, we propose a new attention mechanism: Hadamard attention mechanism. It improves the accuracy of medical image classification without greatly increasing the complexity of the model. Meanwhile, we adopt a simplified inception module to improve the utilization of parameters. We use two medical image datasets to prove the superiority of our proposed method. In the BreakHis dataset, the AUCs of our method can reach 98.74%, 98.38%, 98.61% and 97.67% under the magnification factors of 40×, 100×, 200× and 400×, respectively. The accuracies can reach 95.67%, 94.17%, 94.53% and 94.12% under the magnification factors of 40×, 100×, 200× and 400×, respectively. In the KIMIA Path 960 dataset, the AUCs and accuracy of our method can reach 99.91% and 99.03%. It is superior to the currently popular methods and can significantly improve the effectiveness of medical image classification.