Embodiments of the present disclosure provide a method and an apparatus for automatically discovering medical knowledge. In this method, one or more linking concepts having a semantic relation with a starting concept are obtained from a medical literature library. The starting concept represents a disease. Next, one or more target concepts having a semantic relation with the one or more linking concepts are obtained from the medical literature library, and an association degree of each of the one or more target concepts with respect to the starting concept is calculated. The association degree indicates a probability that the target concept can cope with the starting concept. Further, the one or more target concepts are sorted according to the calculated association degrees. In this method, explainable target concepts can be obtained by using semantic analysis, and these target concepts are sorted to increase a possibility of discovering useful medical knowledge.