The editor of this Journal recently brought to my attention that, in our book Healing the Hurt Child: A Developmental-Contextual Approach (Donovan and McIntyre, 1990), we may have the first use in print of the term traurnatology in the context of what has been referred to heretofore as (Figley, 1990). He also informed me about the emergence of the field of traumatic stress and about the development of this Journal (Figley, 1988). I say occasioned because I had no realization whatsoever that this term was not, as the French so aptly put it, monnaie courrante--common currency, what everyone has in their pocket. Had I realized that what I took for granted was, in fact, a term new to our common field, I most certainly would had drawn attention to the fact, as I did with a number of genuinely new terms or expressions in our book, such as therapeutic aptness, therapeutic space, catastrophic coincidence, ludic play, ludicity, and behavioral speech acts. This oversight on my part is telling, for it reflects the extent to which I simply took for granted that was an established and recognized field and that the descriptor was neither new nor of my creating. If, indeed, I have christened a new field, it is the many workers and their shared common concerns that deserve the credit and not I, for I simply referred to this collectivity with the word that came most naturally to mind. The only credit I can claim is simply to have the good sense to think highly of the work of many colleagues in various disciplines. The actual term traumatology is not new to medicine: traditionally refers to a branch of surgery that deals with wounds and disability from injury. Our usage, however, reflects the emergence of a genuine field out of efforts previously viewed as disparate. With all due respect to