Medical literature is the

scientific literature Scientific literature encompasses a vast body of academic papers that spans various disciplines within the natural and social sciences. It primarily consists of academic papers that present original empirical research and theoretical ...

medicine Medicine is the science and Praxis (process), practice of caring for patients, managing the Medical diagnosis, diagnosis, prognosis, Preventive medicine, prevention, therapy, treatment, Palliative care, palliation of their injury or disease, ...

: articles in journals and texts in books devoted to the field of medicine. Many references to the medical literature include the

health care Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement or maintenance of health via the preventive healthcare, prevention, diagnosis, therapy, treatment, wikt:amelioration, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other disability, physic ...

literature generally, including that of

dentistry Dentistry, also known as dental medicine and oral medicine, is the branch of medicine focused on the Human tooth, teeth, gums, and Human mouth, mouth. It consists of the study, diagnosis, prevention, management, and treatment of diseases, dis ...

veterinary medicine Veterinary medicine is the branch of medicine that deals with the prevention, management, medical diagnosis, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, disorder, and injury in non-human animals. The scope of veterinary medicine is wide, covering all a ...

pharmacy Pharmacy is the science and practice of discovering, producing, preparing, dispensing, reviewing and monitoring medications, aiming to ensure the safe, effective, and affordable use of medication, medicines. It is a miscellaneous science as it ...

nursing Nursing is a health care profession that "integrates the art and science of caring and focuses on the protection, promotion, and optimization of health and human functioning; prevention of illness and injury; facilitation of healing; and alle ...

, and the

allied health professions Allied health professions (AHPs) are a category of health professionals that provide a range of diagnostic, preventive, therapeutic, and rehabilitative services in connection with health care. While there is no international standard for defining ...

. Contemporary and historic views regarding diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of medical conditions have been documented for thousands of years. The

Edwin Smith papyrus The Edwin Smith Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian medical manual, medical text, named after Edwin Smith (Egyptologist), Edwin Smith who bought it in 1862, and the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma (medicine), trauma. This document, which ma ...

is the first known medical

treatise A treatise is a Formality, formal and systematic written discourse on some subject concerned with investigating or exposing the main principles of the subject and its conclusions."mwod:treatise, Treatise." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Acc ...

. Ancient medical literature often described inflictions related to warfare.

History

Throughout history, people have written about diseases, how human beings might contract them and what could be done to remedy it. Medicine ranged from folklore and witchcraft to modern

evidence-based medicine Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. It means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available exte ...

. Among the most notable early medical descriptions are found in texts from Egypt (''

Edwin Smith Papyrus The Edwin Smith Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian medical manual, medical text, named after Edwin Smith (Egyptologist), Edwin Smith who bought it in 1862, and the oldest known surgical treatise on trauma (medicine), trauma. This document, which ma ...

'', ''

Ebers Papyrus The Ebers Papyrus, also known as Papyrus Ebers, is an Egyptian medical papyrus of herbal knowledge dating to (the late Second Intermediate Period or early New Kingdom). Among the oldest and most important medical papyri of Ancient Egypt, it ...

'', '' Kahun Gynecological Papyrus''), Mesopotamia ('' Diagnostic Handbook''), India (''

Sushruta Samhita The ''Sushruta Samhita'' (, ) is an ancient Sanskrit text on medicine and one of the most important such treatises on this subject to survive from the ancient world. The ''Compendium of Sushruta, Suśruta'' is one of the foundational texts of ...

'', ''

Charaka Samhita The ''Charaka Samhita'' () is a Sanskrit text on Ayurveda (Indian traditional medicine). Along with the '' Sushruta Samhita'', it is one of the two foundational texts of this field that have survived from ancient India. It is one of the three w ...

''), China (''

Huangdi Neijing ' (), literally the ''Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor'' or ''Esoteric Scripture of the Yellow Emperor'', is an ancient Chinese medical text or group of texts that has been treated as a fundamental doctrinal source for Chinese medicine for mo ...

''), Rome ('' De Medicina''), and Greece (''

De Materia Medica (Latin name for the Greek work , , both meaning "On Medical Material") is a pharmacopoeia of medicinal plants and the medicines that can be obtained from them. The five-volume work was written between 50 and 70 CE by Pedanius Dioscorides, ...

''). Important medical works in the medieval Islamic era include texts from Persia (''

The Canon of Medicine ''The Canon of Medicine'' () is an encyclopedia of medicine in five books compiled by Avicenna (, ibn Sina) and completed in 1025. It is among the most influential works of its time. It presents an overview of the contemporary medical knowle ...

'' of

Ibn Sina Ibn Sina ( – 22 June 1037), commonly known in the West as Avicenna ( ), was a preeminent philosopher and physician of the Muslim world, flourishing during the Islamic Golden Age, serving in the courts of various Iranian peoples, Iranian ...

), Spain (Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi's '' Kitab al-Tasrif''), Iraq ('' De Gradibus''), and Syria ( Ibn al-Nafis' ''Comprehensive Book on Medicine''), while important medical texts from early medieval Europe include those from England (''Compendium Medicinæ'') and Byzantine Greece ('' Medical Compendium in Seven Books''). Following

Vesalius Andries van Wezel (31 December 1514 – 15 October 1564), Latinization of names, latinized as Andreas Vesalius (), was an anatomist and physician who wrote ''De humani corporis fabrica, De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem'' (''On the fabric ...

William Harvey William Harvey (1 April 1578 – 3 June 1657) was an English physician who made influential contributions to anatomy and physiology. He was the first known physician to describe completely, and in detail, pulmonary and systemic circulation ...

Ignaz Semmelweis Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (; ; 1 July 1818 – 13 August 1865) was a Hungarian physician and scientist of German descent who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures and was described as the "saviour of mothers". Postpartum infections, ...

Louis Pasteur Louis Pasteur (, ; 27 December 1822 – 28 September 1895) was a French chemist, pharmacist, and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, Fermentation, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization, the la ...

, and others, the medical community have changed the way it conducts

research Research is creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge. It involves the collection, organization, and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular attentiveness to ...

. After incorporating the

scientific method The scientific method is an Empirical evidence, empirical method for acquiring knowledge that has been referred to while doing science since at least the 17th century. Historically, it was developed through the centuries from the ancient and ...

, medical literature has introduced

peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (:wiktionary:peer#Etymology 2, peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the ...

, and is currently divided into journals and textbooks.

Medical journal

These are publications in which the medical community shares information. The common articles are original articles, reviews and

case report In medicine, a case report is a detailed report of the symptoms, signs, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up of an individual patient. Case reports may contain a demographic profile of the patient, but usually describe an unusual or novel occurrenc ...

s. * Original articles describe methods, results, discussion and conclusions and a new research that is conducted by the authors. Although according to the

consensus the

randomized controlled trials A randomized controlled trial (or randomized control trial; RCT) is a form of scientific experiment used to control factors not under direct experimental control. Examples of RCTs are clinical trials that compare the effects of drugs, surgical ...

are the gold-standard for medical research, currently, they constitute only a minority of conducted research. * Reviews are an overview of one particular topic of clinical interest in order to refresh the readers' memory, to enhance an emergence concept or the summary recent publications that haven't appeared in the textbooks yet. Other type of reviews are the systematic reviews and the

meta-analysis Meta-analysis is a method of synthesis of quantitative data from multiple independent studies addressing a common research question. An important part of this method involves computing a combined effect size across all of the studies. As such, th ...

in which a specific clinical dilemma is answered by collecting and summarizing all published data regarding this question. * Case reports are descriptions of clinical cases of rare phenomenon or a new clinical method. Case reports may be of value in assessing unusual medical conditions that cannot be studied in clinical trials. Currently, most of the top-ranked medical journals do not publish case reports because of space constraints or a preference for larger, more definitive studies.

Instances

When looking for specific information in any journal one can use the

National Library of Medicine The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library. Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the NLM is an institute within the National Institutes of Health. I ...

PubMed PubMed is an openly accessible, free database which includes primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institute ...

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

Peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (:wiktionary:peer#Etymology 2, peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the ...

ed journals are ranked higher thus are a better source for medical information than non-peer reviewed journals.

Medical textbooks

A medical manual is

literature Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, Play (theatre), plays, and poetry, poems. It includes both print and Electroni ...

(usually a book) describing

diagnosis Diagnosis (: diagnoses) is the identification of the nature and cause of a certain phenomenon. Diagnosis is used in a lot of different academic discipline, disciplines, with variations in the use of logic, analytics, and experience, to determine " ...

, treatment,

management Management (or managing) is the administration of organizations, whether businesses, nonprofit organizations, or a Government agency, government bodies through business administration, Nonprofit studies, nonprofit management, or the political s ...

, and

prognosis Prognosis ( Greek: πρόγνωσις "fore-knowing, foreseeing"; : prognoses) is a medical term for predicting the likelihood or expected development of a disease, including whether the signs and symptoms will improve or worsen (and how quickly) ...

of various disorders. The first known medical manual is the

of ancient Egypt. After consensus has been reached, it is incorporated in

textbook A textbook is a book containing a comprehensive compilation of content in a branch of study with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions, but also of learners ( ...

s. There are textbooks on every

medical specialty A medical specialty is a branch of medical practice that is focused on a defined group of patients, diseases, skills, or philosophy. Examples include those branches of medicine that deal exclusively with children (pediatrics), cancer (oncology), ...

and they contain comprehensive discussion on all

diseases A disease is a particular abnormal condition that adversely affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism and is not immediately due to any external injury. Diseases are often known to be medical conditions that are asso ...

and their

, therapy and

. The first textbook to utilize experts to write specific chapters within the book was the Cecil Textbook of Medicine edited by Russell Cecil, MD in 1927. The book was an immediate international success because of the idea that single or double author medical books was outmoded, "since the scope of medical knowledge was far surpassing the capacity of any single individual to encompass". Since that time, this has been the standard. Examples are: *'' Cecil Textbook of Medicine'' *'' Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine'' *The '' Oxford Textbook of Medicine'' * '' The Principles and Practice of Medicine'' * The '' Textbook of Pain'' Harrison's ''Principal of Internal Medicine'' is widely considered the most read textbook of medicine ever. It was able to eclipse Cecil's by changing the organization. Instead of organizing by disease, Tinsley Harrison organized the book by region and symptom, allowing students to learn the myriad causes of a patient's symptom, without first knowing the specific disease. Harrison's is also credited for a strong commitment to linking basic science to clinical medicine.

Medical journalism

Health-related information is often disseminated to the public via mainstream media outlets; these reports influence doctors, the general public, and the government. According to one study of 500 US health news stories, between 62 and 77% failed to adequately address costs, harms, benefits, the quality of the evidence, and the existence of other options. Although medical news articles often deliver public health messages effectively, they often convey wrong or misleading information about health care, partly when reporters do not know or cannot convey the results of clinical studies, and partly when they fail to supply reasonable context. Several web sites review medical journalism; examples include Health News Review in the U.S. and Media Doctor in Australia.

Internet

Most prominent journals and textbooks are currently available

on-line In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity, and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed as "on li ...

or via

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...

. Certain online services including

Medscape Medscape is a website providing access to medical information for clinicians and medical scientists; the organization also provides continuing education for physicians and other health professionals. It references medical journal articles, Con ...

and MDLinx offer aggregated digests of new articles from prominent medical journals.

History

Medical journal

Instances

Medical textbooks

Medical journalism

Internet

See also

References

Further reading