Encyclopedia of the History
of Western Medicine

This is a research tool I built because I needed it. I'm writing about concepts of health and disease that Western medicine has wrestled with for thousands of years, and the volume of source material made it impossible to follow a single thread across the whole literature.

It's human-directed and entirely AI-built. Claude Opus 4.7 maintains the encyclopedia. The pipeline: over 1,500 books converted to markdown, broken into chapters, and fed through a framework I developed to generate structured metadata. Claude analyzes each chapter and produces evidence cards — extracted claims tagged to their source material — then cross-references them across the entire library, finding corroboration, tracing intellectual lineages, flagging contradictions. New chapters are ingested daily. The corpus draws from over 300 source books across the history of Western medicine, with traditional Western herbalism and medical pluralism as a central spine.

Scope: Greek, Roman, and Hellenistic medicine; the Greek-Arabic-Latin transmission; medieval and Renaissance Europe; the Eclectic, Physiomedical, naturopathic, and phytotherapy traditions; the rise of biomedicine; psychiatric and bioethical history; and the philosophical apparatus that Western medicine uses to think about itself. Non-Western canonical traditions appear as context where the West encountered them, not as standalone subjects.

Every claim traces back to a specific chapter in a specific book. Where scholars disagree, both positions are presented. When gaps exist, they're marked rather than papered over. I fact-check a dozen claims a day. Every time I think I've found an error, it turns out to be mine. I'm sure AI errors will surface eventually, but so far they've been minimal.

638 entries (254 persons, 312 concepts, 29 events, 43 texts) drawing on 34,044 evidence claims from 322 sources. A living research tool across 2,500 years of Western medical history.

— Thomas Easley, RH (AHG)