ABSTRACT
The campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars saw battles that resulted in huge numbers of soldiers being killed or wounded in a single day. At Borodino on 7 September 1812, the worst of these battles resulted in 80 000 French and Russian soldiers being killed; in addition, the Russians inflicted 35 000 wounded on the French.1 During these campaigns, Baron Dominique Larrey (1766-1842), Chief Surgeon to Napoleon Bonaparte, introduced a system of sorting the casualties arriving at his field dressing stations. Triage comes from the French trier, ‘to sort or to sieve’, and was originally used to describe the selection of coffee beans. It is the process of sorting patients according to priority in order to establish an order for treatment and evacuation. Larrey’s primary objective was the swift return of fit men to action and minor wounds were treated early – thereafter his priorities were similar to those in use today. He used senior military surgeons as triage officers, finding that experienced doctors produced more accurate triage.
