History of medical diagnosis

The history of medical diagnosis began in earnest from the days of Imhotep in ancient Egypt and Hippocrates in ancient Greece but is far from perfect despite the enormous bounty of information made available by medical research including the sequencing of the human genome. The practice of diagnosis continues to be dominated by theories set down in the early 20th century.

An Egyptian medical textbook, the Edwin Smith Papyrus written by Imhotep (fl. 2630-2611 BC), was the first to apply the method of diagnosis to the treatment of disease.

A Babylonian medical textbook, the Diagnostic Handbook written by Esagil-kin-apli (fl. 1069-1046 BC), introduced the use of empiricism, logic and rationality in the diagnosis of an illness or disease. The book made use of logical rules in combining observed symptoms on the body of a patient with its diagnosis and prognosis. He described the symptoms for many varieties of epilepsy and related ailments along with their diagnosis and prognosis which both played significant roles in the practice of Babylonian medicine.

Predated by Babylonian and Egyptian medicine, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) was described in an ancient Chinese text, the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon or Huangdi Neijing which dates to the first or second century BCE. The four diagnostic methods of TCM which are still being practiced today are inspection, listening and smelling, inquiry and palpation.

...
Wikipedia