Fifty Years of Critical Care Medicine.

Abstract

Critical Care Medicine, the first official journal of the Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM), begins its 51st year with this issue. In observance of this golden anniversary, it is altogether fitting that we celebrate with a look back at how the journal has shaped, and has been shaped by, the art and the science of critical care. Last year, I asked our journal’s Senior Editors to propose and solicit a collection of special articles that would illuminate the journal’s many roles. Their task was not to create a history but rather to provide insight into the journal’s interactions with the discipline and its practitioners over the past half century. Drs. Tom Bleck, Phil Dellinger, Margaret Parker, John Marshall, and Henry Masur accepted the task, commissioned 18 articles, and shepherded their creation. I am so very grateful for their work, and I know that our readers will enjoy and embrace the articles. To launch the series, I have reprinted Dr. Peter Safar’s editorial from the very first issue of the journal. Read it and reflect on the vision and mission and aspiration. This series launch also includes the reflections of the four editors of Critical Care Medicine, including remarks from the longtime editor of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, that offers insight into why the journal evolved in particular directions. The special articles of the series will go on refract and filter the journal’s content to showcase the consequences of those decisions and directions. Some focus on unsolved clinical challenges such as sepsis. Others focus on the rise and fall of technical innovation, such as the pulmonary artery catheter. Still others focus on the contributions of a specialty. One focuses on the contributions of women. Eleven global critical care leaders describe their personal engagement with the journal. The collection of special articles cannot and does not exhaust the perspectives through which the first half century can be viewed. Rather, the collection illustrates the diverse purposes of our journal—as a chronicle of progress, as a platform for review and dissemination of scientific advances, as a forum for public discourse and debate, as an official communication channel of the SCCM, and more. Critical Care Medicine is so much more than the record of our Society’s past and our discipline’s present; it speaks to a future repeatedly revised by our authors and our readers, one to be enjoyed by our patients and their families. It continues to capture the evolution of Right Care, Right NowTM. Critical Care Medicine guides us toward our best practice today, and serves as our foundation for the development and implementation of better care tomorrow.