Past Medical History: The Story of EMS

On September 11, 2001 , in Manhattan, sirens stack on top of each other, and the sky turns gray long before the dust reaches the streets. Ambulances roll south. Triage lanes are built on the West Side Highway. Radios fill with call signs and static. Amid the noise, one hospital-based EMS crew responds to an assignment that will not clear. This episode isn’t about headlines. It’s about what it mean...

A small plane disappears into the dark over rural Nebraska. Hours later, a family walks out of the wreckage... injured, freezing, alive. But the moment that changes emergency medicine doesn’t happen at the crash site. It happens somewhere far more unsettling. Inside a hospital that isn’t ready. What follows isn’t malpractice or cruelty. It’s something quieter. More dangerous. That night, James Sty...

In the late 1970s, emergency dispatch was little more than a switchboard. Calls came in as panic. Help went out as guesswork. And the minutes before an ambulance arrived were largely empty. Then one night, a dispatcher stayed on the line with a terrified parent and talked them through saving their baby’s life... using nothing but calm questions, structured instructions, and a voice that refused to...

On a summer night in 1981 in Kansas City, a crowded hotel atrium feels safe. Ordinary. Predictable. Then something truly disastrous happens. What follows is not just a collapse of steel and concrete, but a test of an entire city’s ability to respond when everything moves at once. Ambulances flood toward a single address. Dispatch boards fill. And across town, emergencies continue to happen with no...

On a sunlit highway in Israel in 1978, an ambulance races toward a burning bus under live gunfire. Inside is a young physician who helped write the rules that will decide who lives and who dies in the next few minutes. Her name is Nancy Caroline , and this moment captures the idea that would define her life’s work: survival is decided long before the hospital doors ever open. In this episode, PMHX...

In 1967, in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, calling an ambulance was often a gamble and too often, a losing one. In this episode of PMHX: The Story of EMS , we tell the powerful story of Freedom House Ambulance Service , a group of Black men and women who changed emergency medicine forever. Before paramedics existed, before emergency care reached the streets, patients were scooped up and left alone in...

In June of 1966, an eleven-year-old girl struggles to breathe in a Pittsburgh living room. Help is called. Transport arrives. Care does not.  Her death exposes something medicine had not yet learned how to see... the most dangerous moments are often not the ones inside the hospital, but the minutes before anyone is trained or permitted to act.  In this episode, we follow Dr. Peter Safar as he conf...

In the late 1960s, trauma surgeon R. Adams Cowley became obsessed with a question that refused to leave him alone: why were patients still dying even when everything seemed to be done “right”? By tracking cases minute by minute, Cowley uncovered a brutal truth. The most lethal enemy in trauma care wasn’t always the injury itself, but the time lost before definitive treatment. Quiet injuries were b...

As unarmed helicopters flew into active combat zones, pilots and medics made a radical commitment: they would go wherever the wounded were, no matter the danger. At the center of that promise was Major Charles Kelly, commander of the 57th Medical Detachment, whose final radio transmission... “ When I have your wounded ”... became the creed of Dustoff. This episode traces the evolution of helicopte...

In this week’s aftershow, we take you behind the creation of The Scalpel in the Storm and into the world of Dr. Michael E. DeBakey in a way the main episode didn’t have room for. This is a bit of a deeper push into the wild details, the human moments, and the medical drama you won’t believe is real. Plus, a bit of the showrunner's thoughts and creative insights into creating the audioscape. If Epi...

Before he became one of the most influential surgeons in modern history , Michael DeBakey was just a fourteen-year-old boy in New Orleans holding the wrist of a dying neighbor and learning how fast life can slip away. That moment became the engine that drove him through lecture halls, operating rooms, and eventually into the largest war the world had ever seen.  This episode follows DeBakey from t...

PMHX: No FX is the official aftershow for Past Medical History: The Story of EMS. Each week, creator and co-hosts Sophie, Evan, and some occasional special guests break down the episode in a raw, unscripted conversation about the story, the research, the decisions, and the creative process behind the scenes. No sound design. No effects. Just the humanity, the history, and the craft that shape ever...

When the guns stop firing, the dying doesn’t end. In this episode, we follow the story of a wounded Union lieutenant left to perish on the field at Second Bull Run. He is abandoned not by fate, but by a broken system. That single tragedy may have become the turning point for a quiet, analytical surgeon named Jonathan Letterman.  From the coal-smoked streets of Pennsylvania to the cholera-ridden wa...

In 1793, the French Revolution burned across Europe. Amid the chaos, a young surgeon named Dominique Jean Larrey refuses to stand idle as wounded soldiers bleed and die where they fall. Against orders and tradition, he builds a system that will change the fate of the injured forever... a flying ambulance that brings care to the battlefield itself.  Through Larrey’s defiance and innovation, Past Me...

In 1783, a young merchant’s son lies dying on a frozen Scottish road, his leg shattered, his lifeline severed, and no help in sight. Before ambulances, before medicine as we know it, survival depended on luck, distance, and the kindness of strangers. Through one man’s struggle to survive, Past Medical History: The Story of EMS traces the origins of emergency care from rural folk healers to the fir...

In 1981, the night shift at Bexar County Hospital in San Antonio earned a name whispered in fear... t he Death Shift .  Tiny lives in the pediatric ICU began to fail without warning. Alarms blared. Monitors flatlined. And at the center of it all stood one nurse whose touch brought not healing, but horror. In this Halloween Special Edition of Past Medical History: The Story of EMS, we take you into...

Step inside the ambulance of history. Past Medical History: The Story of EMS is a cinematic documentary podcast that unearths the wild, untold, and sometimes downright eerie origins of modern emergency medicine. Hosted by flight paramedics Evan Claunch and Sophie Fuller , this isn’t your typical medical lecture, it’s an adventure through time. Through immersive soundscapes , cinematic scoring , an...