The process of sorting patients based on the urgency of their medical needs to determine treatment priority. It ensures that the most critically ill patients receive immediate attention while less urgent cases wait.
From French 'trier' meaning 'to sort' or 'to pick out,' originally used in coffee trading to separate beans by quality. The medical meaning emerged during World War I when French military doctors had to rapidly sort wounded soldiers by severity of injury.
Triage was born from the brutal mathematics of war - French battlefield surgeons realized they could save more lives by letting some soldiers die to focus on those they could actually help. This cold calculus became the foundation of modern emergency medicine, where tough decisions save the most lives possible.
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