In medicine, triage () is a practice invoked when acute care cannot be provided due to a lack of resources. The process rations care towards those who are most in need of immediate care, and who will benefit most from it. More generally it refers to prioritisation of medical care as a whole. In its acute form it is most often required on the battlefield, during a pandemic, or at peacetime when an accident results in a mass casualty which swamps nearby healthcare facilities' capacity. Triage always follows the modern interpretation of the Hippocratic oath, but otherwise there is plenty of leeway in interpretation, leading to more than one simultaneous idea of its nature. The best-settled theories and practical scoring systems used come from the area of acute physical trauma in an emergency room setting; a broken bone obviously counts for less than uncontrolled arterial bleeding, which is likely to lead to death. But no current principle carries over well to mental health, reproductive health (such as abortion), chronic medical conditions, geriatrics, or palliative care (including euthanasia). This is because triage needs to balance multiple and sometimes contradictory objectives simultaneously, most of them being fundamental to personhood: likelihood of death, efficacy of treatment, patients' remaining lifespan, ethics and religion. History The term comes from the French verb , meaning to separate, sort, shift, or select. "Structured triage" was introduced by Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. It was in his armies that the wounded were first categorized and treated according to an order of priority – in times of war, higher priority was given to military personnel over civilians, and the higher-ranked over the lower-ranked. The practice spread to other armies in the following centuries and was coined "triage" by the French. Modern medical triage was invented by Dominique Jean Larrey, a surgeon during the Napoleonic Wars, who "treat[ed] the wounded according to the observed gravity of their injuries and the urgency for medical care, regardless of their rank or nationality", though the general concept of prioritizing by prognosis is foreshadowed in a 17th-century BCE Egyptian document. Triage was used further during World War I by French doctors treating the battlefield wounded at the aid stations behind the front. Those responsible for the removal of the wounded from a battlefield or their care afterwards would divide the victims into three categories: Those who are likely to live, regardless of what care