War (What is it Good For?) Absolutely....One Thing

If you haven't heard the recent news, Obama has pledged to have the troops home for the years end. What a nine years it's been and boy are we not done yet - but that's another story. Instead, I want to share with you a contribution of war that we often take for granted every day; that if it were not for war, our Emergency Medical Services (EMS) System could very well have been entirely different if even existent (it probably would have found its way eventually) if wars were never fought.

You see, to sum up the title, the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) System and the standard of care Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) provide are all bi-products of war. In all honesty, there's no better place to research and develop emergency care techniques then in a setting where there is a large population of continuous wounded. To gain an understanding of how the battlefield gave us our system today, I present to you a brief history of the ambulance.

The history of the EMS is quite old. Have you ever seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail; the scene were Eric Idol is yelling 'Bring out yer dead!' whilst pushing a cart full of dead bodies? Welcome to the 1400s version of the ambulance system! No more than a cart meant to take away incurable patients from the home and streets.

As time marches on, we find ourselves in more and more wars. The 1790s, during Napoleon's reign, comes the development of horse-drawn carriage (called 'Flying Ambulances') transferring fallen soldiers from the battlefield after receiving treatment on the spot! Replace horse with Copter and Jeep (Flying Ambulances!) and we've got the modern day war-zones.

When it comes to civilian pre-hospital care, the system we are familiar with on the home-front, we can grasp that development by understanding that the military cared for the sick, wounded and dead by transporting them to medical stations. Soon, we have the evolution of normal civilians taking any and all forms of vehicles that developed through time and sticking to those vehicles a basic motto of 'You call. We haul. That's all.' The operators of these ambulances did not provide medical care to the patients they were bringing to the hospital. As larger accidents with high casualties began occurring (on our home-front war-zone, the highway), the realization that these ambulances needed to provide care at the scene came to fruition. Lastly, thanks to President Kennedy and his attack on motor-vehicle deaths being one of the biggest diseases in America, the Department of Transportation (DOT) was charged with creating, maintaining and furthering the development of the EMS System.

How's that for a trip through time! Remember to stop by The Smart Med Card to check out our evolution! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter service too!