Abstract
Current clinical medicine has been under the great pressure of a tremendous amount of information. If we do not want to accept ?Ignorance is strength? (9), we must cope with new disciplines like evidencebased medicine (13), experts systems (8) and many others.
However, it may be surprising that these new disciplines are not as new as one might think. The principles of evidence-based medicine date back to medieval China when the method of ?kaozheng? (practicing evidential research) was used during the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1736 ? 1796).
In postrevolutionary Paris (1794), the physician Pierre Louis publicly rejected pronouncements by the authorities at that time that venesection was good for the treatment of cholera (based on his systematic observation of patients) (13).