Preface

This marks the 41st year of publication of our textbook, which began as a compendium of “answers” to a massive set of questions developed by members of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) for the Emergency Medicine Board Certification Examination. The first ACEP edition was developed in 1978 as “The Study Guide,” and in 1985, it matured into the first of 34 years of McGraw-Hill editions. This ninth edition continues to expand in a scope and depth that we could not foretell 41 years ago. We continue to provide clinically focused information for all emergency medicine learners and practitioners, from students and residents, to emergency medicine physicians, advanced practice providers, emergency medical technicians, and paramedics. We believe each subsequent edition demonstrates the vital contemporary role of emergency medical care for individual patients as well as for the health of the public.

This is much more than a book of emergency medicine content. It is the result of contributions over the years by over 2000 authors committed to the education and practice of emergency medicine. I give special thanks to Howard Werman, MD, Professor of Emergency Medicine at Ohio State University, James Niemann, MD, Professor of Emergency Medicine at David Geffen School of Medicine, and Joseph Stephen Stapczynski, MD, Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Arizona – Phoenix, for being the only authors who have contributed to every single McGraw-Hill edition over its 41-year history!

The ninth edition is a component of a larger work, AccessEmergencyMedicine.com, which blends the advantages of the web version of the ninth edition of Tintinalli’s Emergency Medicine, with the leading web-based clinical texts including Ma & Mateer’s Emergency Ultrasound; Shah & Lucchesi’s Atlas of Pediatric Emergency Medicine; Goldfrank’s Toxicologic Emergencies; Iserson’s Improvised Medicine; and Knoop, Stack, and Storrow’s Atlas of Emergency Medicine. Audio posts of each chapter are available as TNT (Tintinalli’s Necessary Takeaways, by E. Paul DeKoning, Christina Shenvi, Timothy Buff, and Collyn Murray), and monthly blogs are available as BoB (Best of the Blogs, by Alex Koyfman and Brit Long). Procedure videos using traditional and ultrasound techniques are available through Multimedia. Videos are hyperlinked in the web version of the ninth edition and are continually developed at emergency medicine academic sites. Our goal is to continue to develop a set of exemplary educational tools to meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s emergency physicians.