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Nothing new under the sun

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When reading about evidence-based health care you might easily assume that it is a fairly recent development. How did we manage before the arrival of the Cochrane Collaboration and the mavens of McMaster? In fact, as the web-based resource The James Lindⁱ Library (http://www.jameslindlibrary.org) shows, testing the effectiveness of medical interventions dates back as far as the Old Testament (with the first controlled trial recorded in the Book of Daniel). The library, established and edited by Iain Chalmers, aims to improve general understanding of fair tests of treatments and does so by showing how methods of evaluation have developed over time, from 2000 BCE to the present. An abundance of essays consider topics ranging from why fair tests are needed to the introduction of meta-analyses, and the collection also includes a selection of biographies and commentaries to provide context. To show that there really is nothing new under . . . [Full text of this article]