EMS Innovators

Emergency Medical Services have relied on the creativity of its practitioners to develop new and effective ways of providing patient care during crucial moments in time. The men and women in this exhibit paved the way for EMS as we know it today. Without their foresight and leadership we would not have the equipment, procedures, and training that provide life saving care everyday to millions of people around the world.

Do you have information on an EMS Innovator that should be included in this exhibit? Message us your suggestions and we will review them for inclusion, be sure to check back as we will continue to add to this exhibit!

DR. EDWARD DALTON (1834-1872)

During the Civil War, Dr. Edward B. Dalton, a surgeon in the Army of the Potomac, was assigned the task of establishing field hospitals behind the battle lines. The wounded, most with gunshot wounds and associated fractures, were removed from the front using stretchers, horse-drawn carts and two-wheeled wagons, frequently sustaining further injury in the process. Recognizing that this process needed vast improvement to expedite removal and decrease secondary injuries, Dr. Dalton developed the military ambulance. Dalton’s ambulance had a roof to shelter the wounded and a suspension system to absorb the shocks of rapid movement over irregular ground. A red cross emblazoned on the side identified the wagon as a conveyance of the wounded. The Dalton ambulance became the standard throughout the Army, and was credited for saving hundreds, if not thousands of lives

DR. EMILY DUNNING BARRINGER (1876-1961)

Upon her graduation from Cornell University School of Medicine in 1897, Emily Dunning faced the traditional “male only” barrier of the medical profession. Though women had gained admission to medical colleges, none were allowed appointments to a hospital house staff. Encouraged by mentor Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi to take the competitive internship exams, Dr. Dunning lobbied the Medical Board and Trustees of Mt. Sinai Hospital, which granted permission to sit for the examination with the understanding she would not be admitted no matter her standing. Dr. Dunning scored first place, and applied to several of the city hospitals. All refused her admission.
In 1902 Dr. Dunning became the first woman admitted to an internship program in New York, at Gouverneur Hospital on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A year later she became the first woman Ambulance Surgeon.

JULIAN STANLEY WISE (1900-1985)

In 1909 a young Julian Wise witnessed a drowning in Virginia’s Roanoke River and set a course for his future career. On May 28, 1928, Wise and nine coworkers at the Norfolk and Western Railway organized the world’s first volunteer rescue squad called The Roanoke Life Saving and First Aid Crew. Wise proved the concept of the squad by staging a mock rescue in 1929, sinking a 250-pound dummy in a pond and calling out the rescue squad. The city of Roanoke, impressed by the demonstration, agreed to provide communication support. A local funeral home donated an ambulance, and Wise’s vision became a reality. This was to become the forerunner of today’s pre-hospital emergency medical services.

ÅSMUND SIGRUD LAERDAL (1914 – 1981)

Åsmund Laerdal founded Tomte Laerdal Toys in Stavanger Norway in 1940. He began manufacturing plastic dolls in 1951 and by the 1960’s the company expanded its line to include realistic rubber wound simulations and first aid materials.

Laerdal collaborated with James Elam and Dr. Peter Safar to develop the CPR training mannequin Resusci-Anne, which is widely used throughout the world as the main training tool for modern CPR. The company, know today as Laerdal Medical, continues to produce and refine these training tools with simulators available as men, women and children.

DR. WILLIAM KOUWENHOVEN (1886-1975)

Dr. William Kouwenhoven began developing a method to shock the a still heart without opening the chest priorr to World War II. His research was put on hiatus during the war, but by 1957, Dr. Kouwenhoven and his team perfected the closed chest defibrillator, which consisted of a small box and two insulated cables with copper electrodes. Johns Hopkins Hospital began using the device as a standard treatment for cardiac arrest immediately after its release.

PROFESSOR JAMES “FRANK” PANTRIDGE, MD, CBE (1916 – 2004)

Professor Pantridge is often referred to as the “Father of Emergency Medicine” or “Grandfather of Prehospital Advanced Life Support”. It was known that most cardiac related deaths resulted from ventricular fibrillation, which frequently happened away from medical care. Pantridge believed that immediate correction of “v-fib” could and should be done at the scene of the event to increase the effectiveness of the treatment. However, a major problem existed; defibrillators of the time could only be operated using a main power supply. In 1965 he developed the first portable defibrillator, a svelte model that was powered by car batteries and weighed 70 kg.

Pantridge believed defibrillators needed to be as prevalent as fire extinguishers, and that if non-physician responders could do CPR, then they could use defibrillators. To make the devices safer and easier to transport. Pantridge’s portable defibrillator would become a key tool in EMS Today’s automated external defibrillator (AED) traces it’s roots to the Pantridge defibrillation units.

DR. PETER SAFAR (1924-2003)

Dr. Peter Safar, an intensive care specialist and, in the late 1950s, pioneered the development of the ABCs (airway, breathing, circulation) of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. In a series of experiments on paralyzed human volunteers, Dr. Safar demonstrated that mouth-to-mouth rescue breathing could maintain oxygen levels in the patient long enough for proper medical care to arrive. Dr. Safar showed that even everyday citizens could effectively perform these techniques if given basic training. Leading to the development of community courses in CPR and basic emergency response.

Dr. Safar was also instrumental in forming the Freedom House training program for inner city medics. The program originally launched in Pittsburgh but grew across the country. Today there are still training programs that can trace their roots to the original Freedom House Group.

DR. EUGENE NAGEL (1924- )

In 1964, mobile intensive coronary care units combining CPR, resuscitative drugs, and early defibrillation were being used in a few cities to treat coronary patients. However, these units required doctors be aboard the vehicles, which in many cases was not possible, and resulted in high mortality rates. Dr. Eugene Nagel met with Miami-Dade fire officials and proposed linking a mobile intensive care vehicle to hospital-based medical command and control with radio voice telemetry. Through Dr. Nagel’s vision, fire-rescue personnel were able to successfully use telemetry in the field, eliminating the need for a doctor to be on board during a rescue call. The new telemetry system decreased mortality rates during patient transport to hospitals.

DR. NANCY CAROLINE (1943-2001)

Dr. Nancy Caroline was one of the first doctors to understand that individuals without physician training could perform emergency skills traditionally relegated to doctors. With Dr. Walt Stoy and others, Dr. Caroline, created and implemented the Emergency Medical Technician-Paramedic curriculum in the early 1970s which trained personnel in advanced life saving procedures and medication administration, creating the nation’s first paramedics. In the late 1970s, Dr. Caroline wrote Emergency Care in the Streets as a textbook that specifically addressed the unique working environments that EMTs faced daily. For ten years her book was the only resource available for paramedic care and training; her work is still revered as the original paramedic textbook.

Dr. Caroline continued her advocacy of community training when she became involved in training members of Freedom House Enterprises Ambulance Service in the Pittsburgh, PA area as well as during her work overseas where introduced the concept of mobile intensive care units and trained providers in rapid response techniques.

DR. MAX HARRY WEIL (1927-2011)

Born in Baden Switzerland, Max Harry Weil lived in Germany before his family escaped Nazi rule by moving to New York City in 1936. He seemed destined to be a physician from a young age; as a boy, he liked to leave the house with a first-aid kit. He served in the U.S. Army as a medic, and graduated in 1952 from the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in physiology at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota in 1957, before moving to Los Angeles.

Weil’s long list of accomplishments included being involved in the 1955 creation of the first bedside shock cart, a precursor to today’s “crash cart”, which holds lifesaving equipment and supplies. He also was instrumental in introducing computerized patient monitors that measure a patient’s vital signs (1961) and computer-aided medical decision-making (1976), and he implemented the first “STAT” laboratory (1981), which provided quick lab results for the evaluation and treatment of critically ill patients in the ICU.Dr. Weil was also renowned as a teacher, training thousands of doctors and nurses in critical-care medicine. “My greatest joy has been an opportunity to set young physicians on the path of doing good medicine,” he said in 2006.

JAMES “JIM” O. PAGE (1936-2004)

Possibly the most recognizable of all the founding figures of EMS, Jim Page began his career in public service in 1957. Although not a physician his career highlights many of the milestones in EMS history during the latter half of the 20th Century. Page served as an adviser to the TV show Emergency!, director of the Advanced Coronary Treatment (ACT) Foundation, early proponent of citizen CPR, North Carolina EMS director, LA County EMS systems innovator, magazine founder, a prolific EMS advocate, attorney, prolific speaker, and educator.

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