Dr. Paul Auerbach, an emergency care physician who pioneered the field of wilderness medicine in the 1980s and then taught ways to heal people injured by the unpredictable, died June 23 at his home in Los Altos, CA. He was 70. Out in the wild, knowing how to treat a venomous snake bite or a gangrenous infection can mean the difference between life and death. In the 1970s, however, the specialized field of health care known as wilderness medicine was still in its infancy.

“Paul literally conceived of this subspecialty of medicine,” said Dr. Andra Blomkalns, chair of emergency medicine at Stanford. “At the time, there wasn’t a recognition that things happen when you’re out doing things. He developed this notion that things happen to people all the time, which is now a big part of our identity in emergency medicine.”

His book, Management of Wilderness and Environmental Emergencies (1983), is widely considered the definitive textbook in the field, with content about snakebite, frostbite and lightning strikes, etc.

Last year, shortly before he received his cancer diagnosis, the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold. “The minute it all first happened, he started working on disaster response,” his wife, Sherry, said. “Hospitals were running out of PPE. He was calling this person and that person to learn as much as he could. He wanted to find out how to design better masks and better ventilators. He never stopped.”