Since the time of Florence Nightingale, the need for critical care specialists has been recognized and has evolved. Critical care is most often recognized in the Emergency Room or Trauma Center, but is conspicuously present in other areas of the hospital like the post-surgical unit, recovery room, intensive care unit or neo-natal intensive care unit.
The first care center to address the needs of premature infants was established in 1927, in Chicago, at the Sarah Morris Hospital and set standards for post-natal care of these most precious little ones across the medical industry. Today this care has risen to levels completely unforeseen in 1927 to save even the most fragile of lives.
During World War II, the need for resuscitative care for battle-injured soldiers and those undergoing surgery, resulted in the first ‘shock’ wards, or what we know today as the ‘crash cart’ and the code blue call, while a couple of years later the polio epidemic that swept through Europe and the U.S. resulted in the manual ventilation of patients through a tube placed in the trachea. In the 1950s the first ICUs, intensive care units, came into being as mechanical ventilation went from fantasy to reality, and by the 1960s most hospitals in the United States had at least one ICU.
