American Sirens author Kevin Hazzard tells the story Freedom House, a neighborhood nonprofit that, with the help of a pioneering physician, trained some of the nation's first paramedics.
author Kevin Hazzard tells the story Freedom House, a neighborhood nonprofit that, with the help of a pioneering physician, trained some of the nation's first paramedics.This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. In most of the United States today, if you have a medical emergency, you can dial 911 and count on an ambulance arriving with a crew who have the equipment and training to perform CPR and provide other critical care before getting you to a hospital.
KEVIN HAZZARD: I mean, you could almost describe it as criminal, to be honest with you. In fact, there's a paper that's published in 1965. It's known now in the EMS community as the white paper. Essentially, what it says is that, you know, paramedics are too few to be there when you need them and too unskilled to be much use when they arrive. And, you know, the result of that is that in 1965 alone, more Americans die on highway accidents than had in the entirety of the Korean War.
And the idea was if we move them around enough that their lungs, just by that movement, will expand and contract. And that, you know, through some sort of magic, will bring oxygen down into their lungs and then bring it through their body somehow. Safar took one look at that. And he knew, you know, instinctively that there was no way this did anything. And all it was really doing was just wasting time until this person died. So he, you know, came up with a plan of his own.
DAVIES: So they weren't actually dying? He wasn't actually killing them, but he was failing to restore their breathing, right?DAVIES: Do you know if there were any close calls in the experiment where - experiments where, you know, things got dicey and it looked like somebody might not restore breathing?
So he gets in, and, you know, this crowd is rapt. He gets about three words into his speech, and he collapses. By the time he hits the floor, he's already in cardiac arrest. People begin to unbutton his shirt. Somebody calls for help. As luck would have it, there's a nurse in the crowd that night by the name of Karen McGuire. Karen rushes up and begins performing CPR. Now, again, because somebody called for help, that means that the police are going to arrive.
DAVIES: And so people recognized that this tragedy was due, in part, to failures in emergency medicine, right? So he's got this fantastic idea, but he doesn't have any people. He knows that throughout history, they've tried to get doctors to do this job. It failed. They tried to get nurses to do this job. It failed. They weren't sure what to do. And so he knew you needed a new brand of professional, which meant that you needed to train people who had never been in medicine before. He didn't know where to get those people.
Hallen and McCoy listen to it. They know right away, like, wow. A - this is a genius idea. And B - like, we are not equipped to do this at all. We have just ordinary people with no sort of training. And of course, Safar says, no, no, you don't understand. That's what I need. I need ordinary people. I need to prove that this is reproducible in a thousand different cities all across America. I need ordinary people. And they say, great, we've got ordinary.
HAZZARD: Yeah, it was in a couple different neighborhoods. So it's in the Hill, but it's also in Oakland, which was - part of the university was there, so that neighborhood was mixed. But it was also downtown, you know, which was predominantly white. DAVIES: You know, everybody was sort of used, I guess, to a call for emergency help, meaning the dispatch of someone who would basically toss you on a stretcher and get you to the hospital as quickly as possible.
And they check the tube - properly placed. They get to the hospital. Everything is moving very quickly when you arrive with a critical patient. And all of a sudden, everything screeches to a halt. And all eyes turn to the doctor, who's sort of pointing at this patient with this tube sticking out of his mouth. And he says, who did that? And then, now all eyes turn to John, who's standing in the corner. And he says, well, I did.
HAZZARD: John was born in Atlanta in a neighborhood dead center of the city known as Buttermilk Bottom, which was, you know, a Black slum through the 1950s. It didn't have running water or electricity, which is kind of staggering to imagine, that there's a major U.S. city that in 1950s didn't have basic services. That's how he was coming up. And his mother died when he was very young. And he and his sister found their way into an orphanage.
HAZZARD: It was all too common, is what he said. You know, here's a sort of perfect example. He and his partner one afternoon are dispatched to a woman with chest pain. She's in a high-rise downtown. They park outside. They ride the elevator up. They're on their way in. They're, you know, pushing their stretcher through this office. And they round the corner. And they find this woman who has sort of hope in her eyes - right? - because she's having chest pain.
HAZZARD: Oh, yeah. So the cops were - all dispatch at that point went through a central location and then would be sent out to its specific - you know, its specific service once they realized what the emergency was. Well, Freedom House realized that, you know, the police officers, who very much did not want them to exist, one, they were afraid they were going to lose their jobs.
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with writer Kevin Hazzard. He has a new book about a community organization in Pittsburgh that, in the 1960s, trained some of America's first paramedics and created a revolution in emergency medicine. The book is"American Sirens: The Incredible Story Of The Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics."
She's a little intimidated by the guys, to be perfectly frank. You know, she's honest about that. She's, you know, this white Jewish woman from the suburbs of Boston. She arrives here in this - you know, in the Hill District and finds herself surrounded by Black men. And she's, you know, a little intimidated. And so she says, well, look, there's only one way to do this, and that's to throw myself into it.
And so they buy in, and they begin to see results very quickly. They're getting different responses from doctors, different responses from nurses. They see that their skill level is going up. She's taking them to class every day. She's literally kicking open doors in the hospital, places that they're not allowed to go.
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