405- Freedom House Ambulance Service

7/8/2020 by Roman Mars

Web player: https://podplayer.net/?id=109362755
Episode: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/media.blubrry.com/99percentinvisible/dovetail.prxu.org/96/57a15f33-53a2-4025-9caa-66a6d213674f/405_Freedom_House_Abulance_Service_pt01.mp3

One night halfway through a graveyard shift at the hospital, orderly John Moon watched as two young men burst through the doors. They were working desperately to save a dying patient. Maybe today he wouldn’t bat an eye at this scene, but in 1970 nothing about it made sense. The two men weren’t doctors, and they weren’t nurses. And their strange uniforms weren’t hospital issued. Moon was witnessing the birth of a new profession—one that would go on to change the face of emergency medicine. The two men were some of the worlds first paramedics, and, like Moon, they were Black. This is the story of Freedom House Ambulance Service of Pittsburgh. They were the first paramedics and they changed the way we think about emergency medicine.

Did you ever think about who took people to the hospital back in the 1950s before ambulances? It turns out that EMTs are a relatively new invention that came out of the African American community where people who were injured didn’t want to be taken to the hospital in a paddy wagon on a cot.