Johannes de Gorter: vertigo and the evidence-based medicine

In the last decade of the sixteenth century, we witnessed the emergence of a new way of conceiving medicine as a clinical method for transferring knowledge derived from scientific research to the treatment of individual patients. This method, based on the analysis and use of scientific evidence, has been proposed to support clinical, managerial and health policy decisions. Both the guidelines and open access were born from this new way of considering medicine and the need to make access to scientific contributions more usable and universal. This contribution aims to underline that in reality the idea of an evidence-based medicine was already present in the eighteenth century and that had as its exponent Johannes de Gorter, a Dutch doctor and prolific author of medical texts who was born in Enkhuizen, in the second half of the seventeenth century he arrived at the study of medicine at just 19 years old, he was a student of Herman Boerhaave, and who in the book “ Medicina Dogmatica “ expresses exactly the principles that also regulate the current EBM.