Foreword

Within a given medical specialty, typically two or three major textbooks help define the breadth and depth of a discipline. This Atlas of Emergency Medicine, for the field of emergency care, is one of these defining works. First appearing in 1997, the 4^th Edition of the Atlas is now published in multiple foreign languages and available electronically, which makes it universally available and important for patient care across the globe. As many acute diagnoses are made visually, and many physicians are visual learners, the Atlas of Emergency Medicine serves as an outstanding educational and reference tool for the medical student, resident, and particularly the practicing emergency physician. It is a useful adjunct in preparation for the pictorial section of certification tests. This Atlas also serves as a valuable resource for other ambulatory care specialties such as pediatricians, general internists, family physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners, by providing an approach designed by emergency physicians for patients with emergent conditions.

The 4^th Edition of the Atlas of Emergency Medicine has been completely revised by the four editors as well as expert emergency physician contributors from across the specialty. It now contains 1500 full color photographs, electrocardiograms, and radiographs, 500 newly chosen for this 4^th Edition. The chapters are arranged logically by organ system, special populations, and clinical problems. Environmental conditions, toxicology, electrocardiographic abnormalities, forensic medicine, airway procedures, tropical medicine, microscopic diagnoses, and emergency ultrasound are some of the special sections that greatly expand the usefulness of this Atlas for the practicing clinician caring for patients with emergencies. A clinical summary, management and disposition approaches, and pearls for photographic stimuli of a particular diagnosis make this text a full purpose reference. The impressive Table of Contents and exhaustive Index of the 4^th Edition provides a comprehensive ability to access the important photographs, diagrams, and radiographs necessary to quickly help care for the patient presenting with an emergent condition. This expansion of topics and diagnoses has made this textbook a major resource in multiple medical environments for clinicians worldwide.

This 4^th edition of the Atlas, for the first time, also provides access to videos to help improve the diagnostic capabilities of the clinician and complement the static photographic images. The editors are to be congratulated for continuing to expand the scope and media of this major work, while continuing to search for better photographic representations of disease processes for this latest edition.

For me personally, this Atlas of Emergency Medicine 4^th Edition represents the incredibly successful germination of an idea started as a conversation between an emergency medicine attending physician and a very talented emergency medicine resident (the senior editor of this Atlas, Dr. Knoop) during an overnight shift in the University of Cincinnati Medical Center emergency department, now over 20 years ago. The critical gap in the Emergency Medicine textbooks of the early 1990's was the lack of a comprehensive and practical pictorial atlas available for real-time diagnosis of patients presenting to emergent care settings. This book has not only bridged this gap, but also now provides the concise diagnostic and treatment information necessary for the emergency physician or other practitioners to manage the patient and carefully disposition them in real time, at the bedside. I believe this important Atlas of Emergency Medicine, now a classic in its 4^th Edition, will remain a mainstay for the hospital emergency department and outpatient clinic libraries, as well as have a major presence in the savvy clinician's personal reference collection long into the future.