Early Evidence-Based Medicine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The expression “evidence-based medicine” was probably coined at the McMaster University of Canada in the late 1980s and was largely supported by the science of statistics applied on medical research. The word “statistics” originated in eighteenth century Germany, its science, however, originated long before that. In this article we present some early clues of application of statistical principles on medicine from the Roman era, which, albeit rudimentary, contain many modern basic principles of statistics, like the concepts of sample size, mean, distribution of population, representativeness and randomization of the sample. Most clues come from Galen's writings and are probably cited for the first time with a statistical point of view. We also present one of the earlier randomized controlled trials of an antidote in history.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.077 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".