In situations where doctors and nurses and tools are limited, on battlefields, for instance, one performs triage by attending first to the severely wounded who have the best chance of survival. The aim is to save as many as possible; the others may have to die unattended. In the peacetime case, however, in well-staffed and well-stocked American emergency rooms, for example, triage isn’t supposed to imply withholding care from anyone; rather, it’s identifying the patients in gravest danger and giving them priority. Farmer has constructed his life around this second kind of triage. What else is
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