Toward a national standard in primary mass casualty triage.

Triage, or “to sort,” had its genesis in war. In battles marked by frontal assault tactics, fields were covered with the wounded and the dead during and after the battle. Until the Napoleonic wars, however, there was no triage: medical care was not routinely offered on the battlefield, and the survivors self-identified through the test of time. Separating the living from the dead then occurred in the days after the battle ended.1