Principles of social emergency medicine

Throughout most of its history, emergency medicine was practiced on distinct islands, without the standardization, support, or oversight that we expect today. As recently as 50 years ago, most physicians practicing in the ED had no formal training, but rather were likely to be unsupervised house staff across a variety of specialties. In its earlier days, emergency medicine was primarily focused on saving the lives of the critically ill or injured, with less attention paid to everyone else. However, after 2 decades of profound changes beginning in the 1970s, emergency medicine seemed to develop a new identity.

This article is part of a special supplement: Inventing Social Emergency Medicine: A Consensus Conference to Establish the Intellectual Underpinnings of Social Emergency Medicine.