Remembering Dr. Frank Pantridge, 1916-2004

Dr. Frank Pantridge—coronary care pioneer and inventor of the portable defibrillator—died December 26, 2004, in Northern Ireland. He was 88.

Pantridge, called by some “the father of emergency medicine,” invented the portable defibrillator in 1965 while working at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast and installed the first device, which operated on car batteries, in an ambulance. Prior to that time, defibrillators could only be operated in hospitals with electricity. After Pantridge’s death, the Royal Victoria Hospital paid tribute to him, saying, “It was thanks to him that, in the late 1960s, Belfast was often described as the safest place in the world to have a heart attack.”

Retired emergency physician Eugene Nagel describes Pantridge as “a crusty guy, who had a profound contempt for government and public figures and was sometimes almost impossible to deal with. Some of the authorities wanted to make him into a Florence Nightingale-type hero, but he wouldn’t fit the mold; he wouldn’t say nice things.” Yet, Nagel had the utmost respect for the sometimes reclusive physician.

“If you read his book, An Unquiet Life, you learn that he spent four years in Japanese prison camps during World War II,” says Nagel, “and he was a real problem for the Japanese. One was a so-called death camp, on which Hollywood based its movie Bridge on the River Kwai. They were building the Burmese railroad, and he argued for medicine and medical treatment for prisoners in the camp, who were expected to work from dawn ’til dark, seven days a week, without food until they dropped or died.” Considering his persistence, says Nagel, it’s a wonder the Japanese let him live.

Pantridge became a cardiologist in the early years of that specialty, says Nagel, and carried it back to Ireland, where he went to the homes of people who were presumably having a heart attack and treated them in their home. “This in-home coronary care was unheard of at that time,” says Nagel. “Of course, they would bring the patients into the hospital, but only after they stabilized them at home. When an article on Pantridge’s early coronary care appeared in The Lancet sometime around 1967, it caught the attention of five cardiologists in the United States: Richard Crampton at the University of Virginia-Charlottesville; Bill Grace at St. Vincent’s in New York City; Leonard Cobb at the University of Washington; Jim Warren at the University of Ohio-Columbus; and Mike Kriley at UCLA-Harbor in Los Angeles. These guys each started a mobile coronary care system emulating what Frank had. He was an icon to these early cardiology centers, each of which gave rise to the very earliest paramedic programs.

“So he was a George Washington-type father figure, and was certainly the father of prehospital coronary care. Anything laudatory that anyone says about Frank Pantridge would not be excessive.”

Dr. Pantridge served on EMS Magazine’s editorial advisory board from 1972–1995.