Pittsburgh’s Freedom House Ambulance Service: The Origins of Emergency Medical Services and the Politics of Race and Health (2019)
Edwards, Matthew L. (Author)
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Volume: 74
Issue: 4
Pages: 440-466
This manuscript explores the history of the Freedom House Enterprises Ambulance Service, a social and medical experiment that trained “unemployable” black citizens during the late 1960s and early 1970s to provide then state of the art prehospital care. Through archives, newspapers, personal correspondence, university memoranda, and the medical literature, this paper explores the comparable, yet different roles of the program’s two leaders, Drs. Peter Safar and Nancy Caroline. Despite its success in demonstrating national standards for paramedic training and equipment, the program ended abruptly in 1975. And though Pittsburgh’s city administration cited economic constraints for its fledgling support of Freedom House, black and majority newspapers and citizens alike understood the city’s diminishing support of the program in racial terms. The paper discusses Safar and Caroline’s well-intentioned efforts in developing this novel program, while confronting the racial, social, and structural constraints on the program and the limits of racial liberalism.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Simpson, Andrew T.;
(2013)
Transporting Lazarus: Physicians, the State, and the Creation of the Modern Paramedic and Ambulance, 1955--73
(/isis/citation/CBB001252788/)
Book
Kathryn Olivarius;
(2022)
Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom
(/isis/citation/CBB181588231/)
Article
M. X. Mitchell;
(2021)
The Cosmology of Evidence: Suffering, Science, and Biological Witness After Three Mile Island
(/isis/citation/CBB799186607/)
Thesis
Inga Kim Diederich;
(2021)
Blood of the Nation: Medical Eugenics, Bio-Nationalism, and Identity Formation in Cold War South Korea
(/isis/citation/CBB132540302/)
Article
Catherine Mas;
(2022)
"Falling-Out" in Miami and the History of Culture in American Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB993268126/)
Book
Allen Dieterich-Ward;
(2015)
Beyond Rust: Metropolitan Pittsburgh and the Fate of Industrial America
(/isis/citation/CBB863714835/)
Article
Seng, Loh Kah;
(2008)
“Our lives are bad but our luck is good”: A Social History of Leprosy in Singapore
(/isis/citation/CBB000930667/)
Book
Anne Pollock;
(2021)
Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB548925523/)
Book
Mary Jane Logan McCallum;
Adele Perry;
(2018)
Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City
(/isis/citation/CBB373446176/)
Article
Kevin McQueeney;
(2018)
Flint Goodridge Hospital and Black Health Care in Twentieth-Century New Orleans
(/isis/citation/CBB564223569/)
Article
Juliana Maria da Silva Trammel;
(2017)
Breastfeeding Campaigns and Ethnic Disparity in Brazil: The Representation of a Hegemonic Society and Quasiperfect Experience
(/isis/citation/CBB573959230/)
Article
Nic John Ramos;
(2019)
Pathologizing the Crisis: Psychiatry, Policing, and Racial Liberalism in the Long Community Mental Health Movement
(/isis/citation/CBB361333452/)
Chapter
Green, Laurie B.;
(2014)
“Hunger in America” and the Power of Television: Poor People, Physicians, and the Mass Media in the War against Poverty
(/isis/citation/CBB001553453/)
Book
Dan Royles;
(2020)
To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS
(/isis/citation/CBB139646090/)
Thesis
Aquino, Hilary Crisp;
(2004)
“In Black, White, and Brown”: The Color Line in Medicine and Public Health, New York City, 1945--1965
(/isis/citation/CBB001561754/)
Book
Inrig, Stephen;
(2011)
North Carolina and the Problem of AIDS: Advocacy, Politics, and Race in the South
(/isis/citation/CBB001550478/)
Book
McCulloch, Jock;
(2002)
Asbestos Blues: Labour, Capital, Physicians and the State in South Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB000771197/)
Chapter
Dilger, Hansjörg;
(2012)
The (Ir)Relevance of Local Knowledge: Circuits of Medicine and Biopower in the Neoliberal Era
(/isis/citation/CBB001422695/)
Thesis
Espino, Virginia Rose;
(2007)
Women Sterilized as They Give Birth: Population Control, Eugenics, and SocialProtest in the Twentieth-Century United States
(/isis/citation/CBB001560963/)
Thesis
McLeod, Kari Suzanne;
(2007)
Health Matters: Public Understandings of Health in 1950s America
(/isis/citation/CBB001561516/)
Be the first to comment!