In a May ceremony in St. Louis, emergency medicine pioneer Dr. Peter Rosen received an honorary doctor of science degree from Washington University.

Dr. Rosen, a 1960 graduate of Washington University’s School of Medicine, is senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School and visiting professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of the Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson. He also is professor emeritus at the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine.

Dr. Rosen has written hundreds of articles, editorials, and chapters to advance the literature of emergency medicine. He was founding editor of “Rosen’s Emergency Management: Concepts and Clinical Practice,” the specialty’s flagship textbook that will soon publish its 7th edition. He is also the founding editor of the Journal of Emergency Medicine and remains on its editorial board.

An expert in medical ethics and the history of emergency medicine, Dr. Rosen received ACEP’s James D. Mills Outstanding Contribution to Emergency Medicine Award in 1984. He was Outstanding Contribution in Education Award winner in 1994.

“It is very humbling to consider the changes in emergency medicine and how much of an impact it has had on the care of patients around the world and to think that I was lucky enough to have had something to do with that evolution,” he said.

Asked what he’s most proud of in his career, Dr. Rosen points to the students and residents who have trained in programs he started, many of whom have become department chairs and succeeded in other notable endeavors. A great niece in Tucson was accepted into the emergency medicine residency there, and one of his former residents is a nephew, making for three generations of emergency physicians in Dr. Rosen’s family. His nephew, Dr. Richard Wolfe, is chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and one of the physicians who treated the wounded in the Boston marathon bombing.

Dr. Wolfe said his uncle had a clear vision of emergency medicine as an academic specialty when most failed to see it as anything more than a dysfunctional part of the health care delivery system. “He was able to communicate and teach an ethical model of practice based on intellectual honesty, equal access to care, and compassion for the needy that was transformative for our specialty.”

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Dr. Rosen completed an internship at the University of Chicago Hospitals and Clinics and a residency at Highland General Hospital in Oakland, California, before becoming a general surgeon and a burn unit physician in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. He was director of the emergency medicine residencies at Denver General Hospital/St. Anthony Hospital Systems from 1977-1988 and at the University of Chicago from 1971-77. He joined the University of California, San Diego, faculty in 1989. Dr. Rosen and his wife, Ann, have four sons and two grandchildren.

Text by Washington University’s Department of Public Relations