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The Way It Was: Project Captures Pioneering Docs` Stories on Video
The initial Pioneers of Paramedicine were crowned in May, and part of the project captured their perspectives on video for posterity.
Drs. Leonard Cobb, J. Michael Criley, Walter Graf and Eugene Nagel were honored for the leading roles they played in helping create their cities' paramedic programs. The County of Los Angeles Fire Museum established the Pioneers of Paramedicine program, with support from Philips and Masimo, to recognize key innovators in bringing advanced lifesaving care to the field in the 1960s and '70s.
Cobb (who worked to establish the first paramedic-staffed mobile intensive care unit, Medic One, in Seattle), Criley (who founded the L.A. County paramedic program), Graf (who helped launch a nurse-staffed mobile coronary care unit in L.A. in '69) and Nagel (who developed, in Miami, the first paramedic program to use telemetry and voice medical control rather than physicians or nurses riding along) received Lifetime Achievement Awards and permanent commemoration in the Museum's Pioneers exhibit.
The project's architects also video-recorded sit-down interviews with the honorees upon their induction.
"EMS is such a young profession in the scheme of things, and a lot of younger EMTs and paramedics don't really even know its history," says Nancy McFarland, chair of the Museum board's Pioneers of Paramedicine committee. "For every bit of this history we lose because we didn't take the time to listen to it and record it, we lose a little bit of ourselves and where we came from. I hope, down the road, people will appreciate that we captured this before it became nothing more than a memory."
Cobb and Nagel were interviewed by Randolph Mantooth, star of the seminal TV series Emergency! and a dedicated current advocate of EMS. Criley and Graf were interviewed by Baxter Larmon, PhD, MICP, director of the Center for Prehospital Care at UCLA. Then all four sat together for a chat with Mantooth and former costar Kevin Tighe.
Tighe's participation spoke to the event's significance. While Mantooth is a frequent speaker at EMS conferences and trade shows, Tighe's had less involvement with the field in recent years. He was battling laryngitis and had commitments to a local stage production, but still appeared to mingle with guests before the Pioneers' gala inauguration event.
The purpose of the videos was to capture the stories behind the Pioneers' stories--the anecdotes, conflicts, tribulations and insights of their sometimes-turbulent efforts.
"There was a lot of opposition to some of the skills paramedics were going to do," notes Larmon. "A lot of people felt things like advanced airways and IVs and defibrillation could only be done in the hospital. It took a lot of convincing people that nonphysicians could do these things--these guys had to battle continuously, and sometimes risk political suicide, for their belief in advanced life support prehospital care."
"They really showed that, through perseverance and dedication to an idea, you can change everything," says McFarland.
The Pioneers of Paramedicine will have a permanent exhibit at the County of Los Angeles Fire Museum. For more: www.pioneersofparamedicine.org, www.clafma.org.
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