Palliative care is not new. It evolved in the 1960s and 1970s before many other medical specialties, such as medical oncology, emergency medicine, and critical care medicine. Although it would be unimaginable to conceive of hospitals, cancer centers, or universities without these 3 specialties, for palliative care, the road toward recognized specialty and adoption by organized medicine was much more difficult, at least in part because of its origins in community hospices and palliative care teams rather than major academic centers and its focus on care of the person rather than more traditional biomedical issues.
