EMS Hall of Fame: The Pioneers of Prehospital Care—Copass, Edmark

The short history of EMS has been driven by the wisdom, foresight, and innovation of countless individuals. As the field ages into its second half-century and its origins fade to the past, it’s worth commemorating the greatest pioneers of prehospital emergency medical services. This series honors these trailblazers. 

Michael Copass

Seattle Medic One

The Medic One program began in 1970 with a small initial cadre of firefighters trained to respond to chest pain calls in the field. Its driving forces, Dr. Leonard Cobb and Chief Gordon Vickery, were quickly supplemented by a fiery neurologist whose demands for excellence helped prod the Seattle/King County EMS system’s growth into a world elite. 

The legendarily gruff Michael Copass, MD, served as Medic One’s director of training and later medical director as it grew into a comprehensive model system. In 1973, at age 34, became director of emergency services at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center. He served there for 35 years, helping make it one of the top trauma centers in the world, before retiring in 2008. He also founded Airlift Northwest in 1982. 

Copass was infamously demanding. A colleague once described him as cross between Gen. Patton and Albert Schweitzer, and local medics grimly joked you’d “run out of ass before Copass runs out of teeth.” But he’s also credited with doing “more for the health of King County residents than any other person.”¹  

That 2000 profile described his influence across all aspects of the county’s trauma care, from training paramedics to determining transport destinations to overseeing services at Harborview. The paramedic training program he developed was part of why 60 Minutes in 1974 called Seattle the best place in America to have a heart attack. 

Copass was so well regarded that when the state of Washington wrote trauma regulations that required board certification in emergency medicine or a relevant specialty for trauma center medical directors, it exempted Copass with a clause permitting qualified physicians who’d run top-level trauma centers.

Reference

1. Solomon C, Kelleher S. The doctor with the iron hand. Seattle Times, 2000 Mar 7; https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20000307&slug=4008642.

Karl Edmark

Direct-current defibrillation; Physio-Control

Seventy years ago defibrillators used alternating current. They were unreliable, ineffective, hard to transport, and damaged the heart. Cardiovascular surgeon Karl William Edmark, MD, developed a direct-current defibrillator that provided lower-energy shocks and was safer and more effective at stopping ventricular fibrillation. 

Belarussian physiologist Naum Gurvich created the first DC defibrillator in the early 1950s, but Edmark paved its way to the U.S. with his 1955 prototype. That same year he founded Physio-Control, a Washington-based company that went on to become a key early player in the development of prehospital care.

Edmark developed a heartbeat indicator in 1959 that detected the exact moment of a heart’s failure, leading to the first commercially marketed external pacemaker. In 1961 came his Edmark Pulse Defibrillator and first successful DC defibrillation of a human patient. 

In 1968 Physio produced the Lifepak 33, the first standalone portable monitor-defibrillator for use in the field. Designed, tested, and manufactured in just three months, it played an important role in development of Seattle’s groundbreaking rescue unit, Medic One. 

Edmark died in 1994. Find an extensive video interview series with him from the Seattle Public Library at https://archive.org/details/seattle-public-library. 

John Erich is the senior editor of EMS World.