"MYCIN was an early backward chaining expert system that used artificial intelligence to identify bacteria causing severe infections, such as bacteremia and meningitis, and to recommend antibiotics, with the dosage adjusted for patient's body weight — the name derived from the antibiotics themselves, as many antibiotics have the suffix "-mycin". The Mycin system was also used for the diagnosis of blood clotting diseases. MYCIN was developed over five or six years in the early 1970s at Stanford University. It was written in Lisp as the doctoral dissertation of Edward Shortliffe under the direction of Bruce G. Buchanan, Stanley N. Cohen and others. It arose in the laboratory that had created the earlier Dendral expert system.

"MYCIN was never actually used in practice but research indicated that it proposed an acceptable therapy in about 69% of cases, which was better than the performance of infectious disease experts who were judged using the same criteria" (Wikipedia article on MYCIN, accessed 08-2017). See also, Shortliffe, Computer-based medical consultations: MYCIN. New York: Elsevier, 1976, and Buchanan & Shortliffe, Rule based expert systems: The Mycin experiments of the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1984. Digital facsimile of this 1984 work from aitopics.org at this link.