From The New England Journal of Medicine Disaster medicine is perhaps the most interdisciplinary of all fields of medicine, and yet because disasters are relatively infrequent, few physicians are familiar with its principles, unique organizational demands, and clinical nuances. Because many of these concepts are novel to the general medical readership, the opening part of such a book should orient the reader to the basics: the defining characteristics of a disaster, the public's role in an immediate response, the role of emergency-medical-services agencies, the role of hospitals, and the integration of all these resources into a coordinated municipal response. This, however, is not the case with Disaster Medicine. Part I, the first of six parts, begins with a discussion of what the authors call "Basic Physics of Disasters" -- an unusual description that has little to do with the physical forces of natural and human-generated hazards on structures and populations. Aside from the chapter on triage, each of the subsequent chapters addresses a specialized issue: pediatrics, infectious diseases, pharmaceuticals, critical-incident stress, and complex humanitarian emergencies. A reader without basic knowledge of disasters might find this a disorienting sequence. The subsequent parts of the book are more consistent with their titles and make for worthwhile reading. Part II, "Disaster Response Planning and Coordination," begins with a solid primer on organizing a hospital's response