Good medicine doesn't happen by accident. In the worst places on earth, it took men with vision to create a new specialty.

Emergency medicine became a recognized medical specialty in 1979. But inside the US Armed Forces, a smaller, quieter revolution was already underway. A handful of physicians — trained in emergency medicine and shaped by military service in Vietnam — were building something new: residency programs, doctrines, systems of care that would follow soldiers from the battlefield to the operating table. Their work gave rise to the combat medic as we know them today, created the Critical Care Air Transport Team (CCATT) concept, and permanently changed how the military thinks about emergency care.

 

Good Medicine in Bad Places collects the oral histories of ten of those founding physicians — men who served from Vietnam through the opening years of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. In their own words, they trace the arc of a specialty being built in real time, under fire.  They created a new specialty out of the work no one else wanted and changed medicine forever.