How America Created, then Forgot, Its Early Emergency Medical LegacyBy Donnie Woodyard, Jr.
Listen with Sir Michael Caine™ and 1,000+ voices
Length3h 29m
About this audiobook
The crisis in American emergency medical services is not that the profession is young. It is that the profession is old, and has been rebuilt on the ruins of something it no longer remembers.
This book reveals a forgotten history: physician-staffed ambulances in the 1860s, hospital-integrated networks funded by municipal budgets, all dismantled by depression, war, and replaced by a transport-only model with no medical training standards and no clinical mission. The EMS system rebuilders of the 1970s created the paramedic, but the compromises they made were supposed to be temporary.
The nation never went back to finish the work.
The struggles EMS faces today are not new. They are inherited — and this is the history that explains why.
