Reviews and Notes: Emergency Care of the Compromised Patient

Emergency Care of the Compromised Patient

Robert D. Herr and Rita K. Cydulka; eds. 808 pages. Philadelphia: JB Lippincott; 1994. $98.00.

Early in the 1970s, textbooks for emergency medicine were poorly adapted versions of traditional texts. These were followed by books organized and edited by emergency physicians but written primarily by specialists who had a major interest in emergency medicine or who believed that they understood the emergency department. Subsequently, emergency physicians began to write their own textbooks, in which only a small percentage of the chapters were written by specialists. These books mainly addressed the pathophysiology and clinical components of presenting problems and paid little attention to the underlying social or medical state of the patient or the state of the patient's environment. They did not recognize that patients with chronic disease generate a large portion of emergency department visits or that the emergency care of these patients is different from that of healthy persons. …