Medical Records, Patient Outcome, and Peer Review in Eleventh-Century Arab Medicine

Abstract

The practice of medical record-keeping dates back to the fifth century BC, when medical practice was dominated by Hippocrates and his followers. In the Hippocratic literature, medical records were used to demonstrate the cause and course of a disease. It was not until the 20th century that clinical records were routinely used as a tool to assess the quality of medical care, to educate physicians, and to evaluate the outcome of therapy 1,2 and management. Because of the increasing significance of medicolegal issues and their implications, the medical record has become an important means of evaluating the quality and outcome of patient care and of identifying errors and deficiencies in patient management with the subsequent legal responsibilities. 1,2 It has been generally assumed that the clinical record was not used as a legal and educational tool before the middle of the 19th century, with most physicians relying on memory for the details of patient history and treatment and later describing them anecdotally. The authors became interested in the history of informed medical consent and medical record-keeping for legal purposes after finding a document of legal medical consent dating