In 'American Sirens,' author Kevin Hazzard spotlights the Black men in Pittsburgh who pioneered America's modern emergency medical service
American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics,who pioneered the profession and formed a model for emergency medical services that other cities copied.
In 1966, the National Academy of Sciences published a white paper that was a damning indictment of the nation’s emergency response system. “Essentially, paramedics weren’t plentiful enough to be there when you needed them and then weren’t well trained enough to be of much use when they were there,” Hazzard says.
Ambulances were, in some cases, hearses that were driven by undertakers from the funeral home that would later plan the patient’s funeral. In other situations, the sick and injured might be tended to by police officers or volunteer firefighters who were not trained to provide emergency care. Americans were more likely to survive a gunshot wound in thethan on the homefront, according to the NAS report, because at least injured soldiers are accompanied by trained medics.
This lack of emergency care hit home for Peter Safar, an Austrian-born anesthesiologist at the University of Pittsburgh and a pioneer of CPR who helped to develop the modern hospital Intensive Care Unit . He lost his daughter in 1966 tobecause she didn’t get the right help between her house and the hospital. So he coped with the loss by designing the modern ambulance—including the equipment inside, plus its paint scheme.
The first people to take the course in 1967 were a group of Black men who were in Freedom House, an organization that originally provided jobs delivering vegetables to needy Black Americans. At first the idea was to switch the delivery service from delivering food to driving people to medical appointments. But, within eight months, the drivers were trained to handle emergencies including heart attacks, seizures, childbirth, and choking.
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