Emergency Medicine: great papers from the Summer of Love to 2017

Reviewing the landscape of Emergency Medicine (EM) publication and research over the past 50 years is an immensely rewarding exercise and emphasises with absolute clarity how far we have come as a specialty in such a relatively short time. The key words which apply to the review are prescient and resonant. The pioneering research undertaken in the earlier years of the specialty represents the very bedrock on which stands Emergency Medicine as we know it today. This paper will highlight some of the key publications during the 50 years of Emergency Medicine in the UK. During the early years from 1967, issues regarding Emergency Medicine in the UK were published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and Lancet, in the absence of any specific journal for the specialty then known as Accident and Emergency Medicine. In USA, the first edition of the Journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians (latterly Annals of Emergency Medicine) was published in January 1972. By the 1980s, there were two journals published in the UK—the British Journal of Accident and Emergency Medicine, initially edited by Sheila Christian from Wexham Park and later by Andrew Mason from Medway Hospital and Archives of Emergency Medicine edited by Tony Redmond. In the mid-1990s, the decision was made to move to a single journal, initially titled the Journal of Accident and Emergency Medicine which evolved into the Emergency Medicine Journal (EMJ) under the auspices of the BMJ publishing group. The authors have selected a number of papers from this period based on the following methodology