Abstract
“Triage” means “sorting out of casualties”. Sorting is needed whenever more casualties present themselves than can be dealt with definitively and simultaneously by the medical staff at hand. The term “mass casualties” is used variously. Ten serious casualties caused by a disaster or in battle with one medical officer on the scene is a mass casualty situation for that physician. Thermonuclear war or a major earthquake with the resultant flooding of medical facilities with vast number of casualties is another kind of mass casualty situation. In each case, the available medical personnel must triage the injured in order to attempt to do the maximum good to the greatest number.
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© 1989 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Reis, N.D. (1989). Mass Casualties and Triage. In: Reis, N.D., Dolev, E. (eds) Manual of Disaster Medicine. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83440-0_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83440-0_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-83442-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-83440-0
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