12 - Personalized Medicine

Summary

‘Dr. Google’ has become the go-to resource when our wellbeing is threatened and we initiate the process of self-medication – due to expediency, necessity, or frugality. Yet, the Internet was not always available to help us minister to the illnesses and injuries we endure. Understanding the origins of modern medicine inevitably turns to its history. Possibly the earliest practitioner of medicine was the Egyptian polymath Imhotep, believed to have diagnosed and treated some 200 diseases. Even more speculation revolves around the prehistory of medicine, when our ancestors could neither read nor write; prehistoric medicine may have used the familiar process of trial-and-error learning to identify medicinal herbs and plant substances. This process has now been documented in many living animals by the emerging science of animal self-medication – zoopharmacognosy. Self-medication may thus have a long evolutionary history, which embraces human evolution, as well as the evolution of most living animals.