Caduceus as a symbol of medicine worth noting that hospital stewards were not physicians; they played a supporting role preparing drugs for surgeons, supervising nurses and cooks, maintaining accounting and medical records, and in emergencies sometimes performed minor surgery or provided prescriptions. Later, in 1871, the Surgeon General designated the caduceus as the seal of the Marine Hospital Service (destined to become the U.S. Public Health Service in 1912). Gershen states that the change was for aesthetic reasons, whereas Friedlander states the caduceus was adopted by the Marine Hospital Service "because of its relationship with merchant seamen and the maritime industry". The caduceus was formally adopted
CADUCEUS (expert system) instead embracing all internal medicine. CADUCEUS eventually could diagnose up to 1000 different diseases. While CADUCEUS worked using an inference engine similar to MYCIN's, it made a number of changes (like incorporating abductive reasoning) to deal with the additional complexity of internal disease- there can be a number of simultaneous diseases, and data is generally flawed and scarce. CADUCEUS has been described as the "most knowledge-intensive expert system in existence". CADUCEUS (expert system) CADUCEUS was a medical expert system finished in the mid-1980s (first begun in the 1970s- it took a long time to build the knowledge base) by Harry