ABSTRACT
The goal of medicine has been, since its inception, to provide treatment recommendations tailored to the illness of an individual. Some of the earliest medical writings clearly document that different empirical therapies were recommended for different constellations of symptoms. For example, the Ebers’ papyrus written in 1500BC recommends that “… for a person who suffers from abdominal obstruction and you find (on physical examination) that it goes-and-comes under your fingers like oil-in-tube, then prepare for him fruit-of-the-dompalm, dissolve in semen, crush and cook in oil and honey.” On the other hand, if a person suffers from abdominal obstruction and you find that “… his stomach is swollen and his chest asthmatic, then make for him wormwood, elderberries, sebesten, sesa chips, crush and cook in beer…”.1 Thus, personalized medicine was born. The subsequent history of medicine is intricately intertwined with technological developments in diagnostic methods which aim to define disease ever more narrowly and predict clinical outcome with or without particular therapies with increasing precision.
