Emergency medicine is a vast specialty and, in the past, few textbooks have managed to comprehensively cover all aspects in a reasonable volume of readable literature

Mitchell and Medzon have set out to produce a textbook aimed at not only medical students but also nurse practitioners and physicians assistants, tackling the most common presenting complaints, some specialty topics, and commonly performed procedures.

My initial feelings were akin to reading the script of “ER”—with many references to legal cases, insurance problems, and the different nomenclatures used across the water in the …