Diagnosis through prisms: Unraveling its complexity

Following a review of accepted submissions for this special issue of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM)'s collected papers on diagnosis, we offer a commentary on the variety of reports. We use the metaphor of Newton's demonstration that a complex percept like the rainbow can be broken down by prisms, into a collection of different wavelengths of light. Like Feynman, we believe that the beauty of something may be revealed and augmented by reducing it to its constituent parts.