Last to Leave, First to Return

When the American College of Emergency Physicians opened its 2006 Scientific Assembly on October 15 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, it was meeting in a facility where just months before emergency physicians had still been treating patients in a temporary emergency room, and in a city where a downtown emergency department was still being operated in an abandoned department store. And so it was especially fitting and significant that emergency physicians — who have