Fersh Air (NPR) December 19, 2022 was an interview with Kevin Hazzard, about his new book: American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics.
Host, Dave Davies, discussed the creation of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) with author Kevin Hazzard. The concept for EMS was first conceived by Dr. Peter Safer, an Austrian physician working in Baltimore in the late 1950s. Safer performed bizarre experiments at Baltimore City Hospital in Baltimore.
[Safar, who began to work on CPR in 1956 at Baltimore City Hospital, demonstrated in a series of experiments on paralyzed human volunteers that rescuer exhaled-air mouth-to-mouth breathing could maintain satisfactory oxygen levels in the non-spontaneously breathing victim,[4] and showed that even laypeople could effectively perform mouth-to-mouth breathing to save lives. He combined the A (Airway) and B (Breathing) components of CPR with the C (chest compressions). He wrote the book ABC of Resuscitation in 1957, which established the basis for mass training of CPR.]
Safer then moved to Pittsburgh, where he helped to start Freedom House Enterprises, which was the world’s first paramedic service. All of the paramedics were a Black men and this caused problems with some of the whites in Pittsburgh.
Hazard interviewed John Moon, who had worked for the Freedom House EMS for decades. Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh was one of the first institutions they worked with.
Things really took off after Nancy Caroline, MD was appointed head of Freedom House. She was an impressive person and in later years was called, “The Mother Theresa of Israel.”
American Sirens is a tribute to the Freedom House Ambulance Service.