What is "The Atlas of Emergency Medicine," 5th Edition?
The Atlas of Emergency Medicine, 5th Edition, edited by Knoop, Stack, Storrow, and Thurman, is the most comprehensive visual reference in emergency medicine. It features thousands of clinical photographs, ECGs, radiographs, and ultrasound images spanning 27 chapters across all major emergency conditions. Ideal for EM residents, students, and clinicians.
Introduction: A Visual Atlas That Belongs in Every Emergency Clinician's Library
There's a moment that nearly every emergency medicine resident experiences early in training — you're standing in front of a patient with an unfamiliar rash, a subtle fracture pattern, or a confusing ECG, and no amount of text-based reading quite prepares you for what you're seeing. What you need, in that moment, is a book that shows you.
That's precisely what The Atlas of Emergency Medicine, now in its fifth edition, was built to do.
Originally conceived in 1994 by a group of clinician-educators united by a shared belief in the teaching power of visual medicine, this atlas has grown over three decades into what the foreword—written by Dr. Corey M. Slovis, Professor of Emergency Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center—describes as "the single most authoritative collection of clinical images, illustrations, ultrasounds, radiographs, and electrocardiograms encountered in the emergency department."
That's not hyperbole. With 27 chapters, 2,573 pages, and contributions from dozens of subspecialty experts across major academic centers, this fifth edition represents the most ambitious update yet—expanding the atlas's scope to include new chapters on rheumatologic conditions and mental health, while substantially increasing the number of high-quality videos, photographs, and figures throughout.
Whether you're a third-year medical student encountering your first clinical rotation, an emergency medicine resident building the visual vocabulary you'll rely on for the rest of your career, or an attending physician who wants an authoritative visual reference at arm's reach, this book delivers something no amount of reading alone can replicate: the ability to see what you need to know.
Book Overview
Full Title: The Atlas of Emergency Medicine, Fifth Edition
Editors:
- Kevin J. Knoop, MD, MS — Program Director, Emergency Medicine Residency, Riverside Regional Medical Center; Clinical Professor, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
- Lawrence B. Stack, MD — Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee
- Alan B. Storrow, MD — Department of Emergency Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
- R. Jason Thurman, MD — Department of Emergency Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Publication Year: 2021
Edition: Fifth (5th)
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-26-013495-7 | ISBN (Print): 978-1-26-013494-0
Pages: 2,573
Medical Specialty: Emergency Medicine
Companion Website: www.ematlas.com (includes companion video collection)
Intended Audience: Medical students, emergency medicine residents, clinicians, nurses, prehospital caregivers, medical technicians, and allied health professionals
What This Book Covers: A Deep Dive into Clinical Content
The fifth edition is organized into two major sections—Regional Anatomy and Specialty Areas—and spans 27 richly illustrated chapters. The editorial philosophy is clear: reduce text to essentials and maximize high-quality visual content.
Part 1: Regional Anatomy
The atlas begins with the head and works systematically through the human body, giving clinicians a regional framework for recognizing pathology:
Chapter 1 – Head and Facial Trauma covers scalp lacerations, skull fractures (depressed, frontal sinus, basilar), herniation syndromes, nasal injuries, zygomatic and LeFort fractures, orbital wall fractures, mandibular fractures, external ear injuries, and penetrating facial trauma.
Chapters 2–4, Ophthalmic Conditions and Trauma, offer an exceptionally thorough visual guide to eye emergencies. The atlas covers everything from bacterial and viral conjunctivitis to acute angle-closure glaucoma, Horner syndrome, thyroid eye disease, myasthenia gravis, and third/sixth nerve palsies—alongside traumatic conditions like corneal abrasion, hyphema, globe rupture, and intraocular foreign bodies.
Chapter 3 – Funduscopic Findings stands out as a particularly valuable resource, illustrating normal and abnormal fundus findings, including hypertensive and diabetic retinopathy, retinal detachment, central retinal artery and vein occlusion, papilledema, cytomegalovirus retinitis, and the classic subhyaloid hemorrhage of subarachnoid hemorrhage.
Chapter 5 – Ear, Nose, and Throat Conditions covers the full ENT spectrum encountered in emergency care, from otitis media and cholesteatoma to epiglottitis, peritonsillar abscess, mastoiditis, Ramsay Hunt syndrome, and Ramsay Hunt facial nerve palsy.
Chapter 6—Oral Conditions addresses dental emergencies (tooth avulsion, fracture, and subluxation); odontogenic infections from gingival abscess to Ludwig angina; and oral conditions ranging from thrush and aphthous ulcers to oral malignancies.
Chapters 7–10—Chest, Abdomen, Urology, STIs, and Gynecology/Obstetrics—take the reader through thoracic and abdominal trauma; non-traumatic thoracic findings; urologic emergencies (including testicular torsion, Fournier gangrene, and priapism); sexually transmitted infections and anorectal conditions; and a comprehensive obstetric/gynecologic section that includes emergency vaginal delivery sequences and obstetric complications.
Chapters 11–13 – Extremity Trauma, Extremity Conditions, and Cutaneous Conditions—form one of the most visually dense sections of the atlas, covering fractures, dislocations, soft tissue infections, necrotizing fasciitis, vascular emergencies, and an extensive dermatology reference covering everything from Stevens-Johnson syndrome to melanoma, psoriasis, and contact dermatitis.
Part 2: Specialty Areas
The second part shifts from regional anatomy to clinical domains that require specialized visual knowledge:
Chapter 14 – Pediatric Conditions is a comprehensive guide to the visual spectrum of pediatric emergency presentations, including neonatal conditions (jaundice and pyloric stenosis), infectious rashes (measles, varicella, fifth disease, and hand-foot-mouth), and general pediatric emergencies from epiglottitis to Kawasaki disease.
Chapter 15 – Child Abuse covers the visual indicators of physical and sexual abuse with clinical precision, including abusive head trauma, skeletal findings, visceral injuries, and mimics of abuse.
Chapter 16 – Environmental Conditions is a wide-ranging chapter covering altitude illness (HAPE, HACE), hypothermia, frostbite, lightning injuries, venomous animal encounters (snakes, spiders, scorpions, and marine animals), and plant exposures.
Chapter 17 – Toxicological Conditions provides visual recognition of common toxidromes and poisonings, including anticholinergic and cholinergic syndromes, opioid toxicity, acetaminophen and salicylate poisoning, and heavy metal toxicities.
Chapter 18 – Wounds and Soft-Tissue Injuries addresses wound assessment, closure techniques, foreign bodies, animal bites, and specialized laceration management.
Chapters 19–21 – Hematologic, HIV/AIDS-Related, and Tropical Medicine cover systemic disease presentations, including sickle cell disease, hematologic malignancies, AIDS-defining conditions, and globally important infectious diseases from malaria to the Zika virus.
Chapter 22 – Airway provides the visual roadmap to emergency airway management, including orotracheal intubation, video-assisted intubation, LMA insertion, cricothyrotomy techniques, and airway management maxims.
Chapter 23 – ECG Abnormalities is among the most clinically practical chapters in the book, organized into ST-T abnormalities, conduction disturbances, rhythm disturbances, structural abnormalities, and ECG changes of noncardiac origin—covering everything from Wellens waves and Sgarbossa criteria to Brugada syndrome and Wolff-Parkinson-White.
Chapter 24 – Emergency Ultrasound walks through FAST exams, cardiac views, lung ultrasound, aortic imaging, DVT assessment, obstetric ultrasound, and ultrasound-guided procedures, including nerve blocks and thoracentesis.
Chapter 25 – Microscopic Findings and Bodily Fluids covers urinalysis, synovial fluid, Gram stains, wet mounts, peripheral blood smear, and CSF analysis—skills that remain fundamental in emergency diagnosis.
Chapter 26 – Rheumatologic Conditions (new to the 5th edition) covers gout, SLE, inflammatory myopathies, vasculitis, rheumatoid arthritis, septic arthritis, juvenile idiopathic arthritis, acute rheumatic fever, and giant cell arteritis.
Chapter 27 – Mental Health Conditions (new to the 5th edition) addresses dermatologic manifestations of mental illness, including trichotillomania, skin-picking disorder, self-harm behavior, substance use disorders, and delusional infestation.
Key Features
- Over 2,500 pages of high-quality clinical photographs, illustrations, radiographs, ECGs, ultrasound images, and gross pathology
- Companion video library accessible via QR code and www.ematlas.com
- Two brand-new chapters: Rheumatologic Conditions (Chapter 26) and Mental Health Conditions (Chapter 27)
- Expanded microscopic findings and bodily fluid analysis
- Contributions from subspecialty experts across leading academic institutions (Vanderbilt, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, UCLA, Colorado Children's, and more)
- Concise, essential-only text that prioritizes image-to-text ratio
- Coverage of tropical medicine and international emergency presentations
- Systematic regional anatomy organization covering head-to-toe visual pathology
- Dedicated ECG chapter with comprehensive rhythm, conduction, and structural abnormality coverage
- Comprehensive emergency ultrasound chapter covering all major POCUS applications
- Previously published in multiple foreign language translations
Who Should Read This Book
Emergency medicine residents will find this atlas indispensable from day one. The breadth of visual content across every organ system closely mirrors the daily reality of emergency care, and the ECG and ultrasound chapters in particular provide the kind of pattern recognition training that is difficult to acquire any other way.
Medical students rotating through emergency medicine benefit from the atlas's ability to compress the visual learning curve. Where lectures and textbooks describe, this atlas shows—and the educational efficiency of that approach is hard to overstate.
Emergency physicians will use this as a reference for less common presentations: tropical disease, unusual toxidromes, rare dermatoses, and complex funduscopic findings all benefit from a quick visual confirmation when they present.
Nurses and Advanced Practice Providers working in emergency and urgent care settings will find the atlas a practical visual reference for recognizing clinical findings and supporting assessment and triage decisions.
Prehospital care providers (paramedics and EMTs) benefit from the atlas's visual approach to rapid condition recognition, particularly in trauma, environmental emergencies, and toxicological presentations.
Family physicians, internists, and pediatricians who encounter acute presentations in their practice will find the Atlas useful for visual confirmation of findings they may see infrequently.
Board Examination Candidates sitting for emergency medicine written boards will benefit from the atlas's pictorial content, which directly parallels the visual question formats used in ABEM and other specialty examinations. The preface explicitly notes that many readers have found the book "extremely useful as a review for written board examinations containing pictorial questions."
Why This Book Is Useful
The foundational argument for visual atlases in medical education — that images teach faster and with greater impact than text alone — is rarely demonstrated more convincingly than in emergency medicine, where rapid visual pattern recognition is a core clinical competency.
In the emergency department, a clinician who can recognize a malar rash at ten paces, identify a Wellens wave pattern on a monitor strip, or distinguish a peritonsillar abscess from a lateral pharyngeal space infection by visual examination alone is simply a more effective clinician. The Atlas of Emergency Medicine is built specifically to develop that competency.
The clinical relevance of the content is directly tied to the specialty's unique demands. Emergency medicine is, as the editors put it in the preface, "defined by time and space."
The ED is the most visually diverse clinical environment in medicine, and a reference that reflects that diversity—from neonatal conditions to geriatric presentations, from dermatology to toxicology, from orthopedic trauma to psychiatric emergencies—provides genuine daily utility.
The expansion of video content in the fifth edition addresses the growing importance of dynamic visual learning. Procedural competencies like airway management, ultrasound technique, and wound closure benefit enormously from video demonstration, and the companion video library available at www.ematlas.com directly supports this.
For board preparation, the atlas serves a specific and well-recognized function: written specialty board examinations in emergency medicine include pictorial questions, and candidates who have systematically reviewed clinical images are meaningfully better prepared than those who have not.
Table of Contents Overview
Part 1: Regional Anatomy
- Chapter 1: Head and Facial Trauma
- Chapter 2: Ophthalmic Conditions
- Chapter 3: Funduscopic Findings
- Chapter 4: Ophthalmic Trauma
- Chapter 5: Ear, Nose, and Throat Conditions
- Chapter 6: Oral Conditions
- Chapter 7: Chest and Abdomen
- Chapter 8: Urologic Conditions
- Chapter 9: Sexually Transmitted Infections and Anorectal Conditions
- Chapter 10: Gynecologic and Obstetric Conditions
- Chapter 11: Extremity Trauma
- Chapter 12: Extremity Conditions
- Chapter 13: Cutaneous Conditions
Part 2: Specialty Areas
- Chapter 14: Pediatric Conditions
- Chapter 15: Child Abuse
- Chapter 16: Environmental Conditions
- Chapter 17: Toxicological Conditions
- Chapter 18: Wounds and Soft-Tissue Injuries
- Chapter 19: Hematologic Conditions
- Chapter 20: HIV-Related Conditions
- Chapter 21: Tropical Medicine
- Chapter 22: Airway
- Chapter 23: ECG Abnormalities
- Chapter 24: Emergency Ultrasound
- Chapter 25: Microscopic Findings and Bodily Fluids
- Chapter 26: Rheumatologic Conditions (New in 5th Ed.)
- Chapter 27: Mental Health Conditions (New in 5th Ed.)
Strengths of The Book
The atlas's greatest strength is its visual comprehensiveness. No other single volume in emergency medicine attempts to cover the full clinical spectrum—from a subtle funduscopic change in a hypertensive patient to a coral snake envenomation, from a neonate's umbilical granuloma to a critically ill patient's ECG—with this level of photographic and illustrative fidelity.
The editorial team's decision to reduce text in favor of more images and greater depth is an editorial judgment that reflects their understanding of how clinicians actually learn. The text that remains is essential and concise, making each image the primary vehicle for learning rather than an afterthought to a written description.
The contributor list is another genuine strength. With chapter authors from Vanderbilt, the University of Maryland, UCLA, the University of Michigan, Children's Hospital Colorado, and numerous other major academic centers, the atlas reflects subspecialty expertise rather than generalist approximation across every clinical domain it covers.
The addition of two new chapters in this edition — rheumatologic conditions and mental health — reflects an honest acknowledgment of the clinical realities of emergency practice.
Rheumatologic presentations are common ED visits, and the visual manifestations of rheumatologic disease (gouty tophi, malar rash, palpable purpura) are frequently the clinician's first diagnostic clue. Similarly, the mental health chapter addresses a growing priority in emergency care.
The companion video library, accessible through the book's QR code system, adds a dimension that print alone cannot achieve and represents a meaningful educational upgrade over previous editions.
Limitations
Readers should be aware of a few practical considerations.
The atlas is, by design and intent, primarily a visual recognition resource rather than a management guide. It does not replace dedicated emergency medicine textbooks (such as Tintinalli's or Rosen's) for clinical decision-making algorithms, drug dosing, or detailed pathophysiology. It works best alongside these references rather than as a standalone clinical guide.
The sheer volume of the book (2,573 pages) makes it impractical for cover-to-cover reading in a single sitting. It functions best as a systematic study tool—one chapter at a time, during subspecialty rotations, or as a targeted review for board preparation—rather than a quick-reference point-of-care tool.
As with any printed medical text, clinical guidelines and diagnostic criteria evolve over time. Readers should supplement atlas content with current clinical practice guidelines where management decisions are involved.
Comparison With Similar Books
Tintinalli's Emergency Medicine: A Comprehensive Study Guide and Rosen's Emergency Medicine: Concepts and Clinical Practice are the dominant text-based references in emergency medicine. They provide exhaustive pathophysiology, evidence-based management algorithms, and clinical decision-making frameworks that the Atlas does not attempt to replicate. The Atlas functions as a visual complement to these texts rather than a replacement.
Roberts and Hedges' Clinical Procedures in Emergency Medicine occupies a procedural niche that the airway and wound management chapters of the Atlas touch on but do not fully address.
For dermatology specifically, Andrews' Diseases of the Skin provides greater dermatological depth, but the Atlas covers the emergency dermatological presentations with superior clinical context.
No other single volume in emergency medicine matches the breadth of visual content across all subspecialty areas that the Atlas provides. In the visual-learning category, it is genuinely without peer in emergency medicine.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Atlas of Emergency Medicine, 5th Edition? It is a comprehensive clinical image atlas covering the full breadth of emergency medicine, published by McGraw-Hill in 2021. Edited by Knoop, Stack, Storrow, and Thurman, it contains 27 chapters of high-quality clinical photographs, ECGs, radiographs, ultrasound images, and video content spanning all organ systems and emergency subspecialties.
Who are the editors of the 5th edition? The four editors are Kevin J. Knoop, MD, MS; Lawrence B. Stack, MD; Alan B. Storrow, MD; and R. Jason Thurman, MD—all with academic affiliations at major emergency medicine programs, with strong ties to Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
What is new in the 5th edition compared to previous editions? The fifth edition adds two entirely new chapters—Rheumatologic Conditions (Chapter 26) and Mental Health Conditions (Chapter 27)—expands the microscopic findings and bodily fluid analysis chapter, significantly increases the number of high-quality videos and photographs throughout, and reduces nonessential text in favor of greater visual density.
Is this book useful for emergency medicine board exam preparation? Yes. The preface explicitly notes that the atlas has been found "extremely useful as a review for written board examinations containing pictorial questions. " The ABEM written boards include visual question formats, and systematic review of atlas images is recognized as effective preparation by emergency medicine educators.
Does the book include video content? Yes. A companion video library is available by scanning the QR code provided in the book or by visiting www.ematlas.com. The fifth edition significantly expanded this video collection compared to previous editions.
Is this book suitable for medical students or only for residents? The preface states that the intended audience includes "clinicians, educators, residents, nurses, prehospital caregivers, medical technicians, and medical students. "Medical students on emergency medicine rotations and sub-internships will find the atlas particularly valuable for rapid clinical visual learning.
What publisher produces The Atlas of Emergency Medicine? McGraw-Hill Education publishes the Atlas. The fifth edition was released in 2021, with ISBN 978-1-26-013495-7 (eBook) and 978-1-26-013494-0 (print).
Is the Atlas of Emergency Medicine available in other languages? The preface notes that previous editions of the atlas "have been translated into multiple foreign languages," reflecting its international educational reach. Availability of translated editions of the fifth edition varies by region.
Conclusion
Thirty years after its first edition, The Atlas of Emergency Medicine remains what it has always been: the most visually authoritative clinical reference in emergency medicine.
The fifth edition doesn't simply update a classic—it meaningfully expands it, with new chapters on rheumatologic and mental health conditions, a substantially enriched video library, and continued editorial commitment to quality over quantity.
For emergency medicine residents, this atlas is not optional supplementary reading. It is, alongside a core textbook, the other half of a complete educational foundation.
The ability to recognize what you're seeing—before you reach for a reference, before the attendant asks—is a clinical skill built through sustained, systematic visual exposure. No book in emergency medicine develops that skill more effectively than this one.
For medical students entering clinical rotations, for nurses and APPs working in acute care settings, for attending physicians who want a visual reference they can trust, and for candidates preparing for written board examinations with pictorial components, The Atlas of Emergency Medicine, 5th Edition, earns its place on every clinical bookshelf.
The best emergency clinicians are pattern recognizers. This atlas builds the pattern library.
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