Description: Until the 1970s, if you suffered a medical crisis, your chances of survival were minimal. That all changed with the Freedom House EMS in Pittsburgh, a group of Black men who became America's first paramedics and set the gold standard for emergency medicine around the world, only to have their legacy erased. Journalist and paramedic Kevin Hazzard tells the dramatic story of how a group of young, undereducated Black men forged a new frontier of healthcare.
Brief description:
Kevin Hazzard is a journalist, TV writer, and former paramedic. His first book, A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic's Wild Ride to the Edge and Back, was published by Scribner in 2016. He now writes for film/TV, with work produced by Hulu, CBS, ABC and Universal. His freelance journalism has been published at 99% Invisible, the Atavist, Men's Journal, Creative Loafing, Atlanta Magazine, and elsewhere. He is also a sought-after voice on emergency medicine. He lives in Atlanta.
Review Quotes: A work that a reads like a novel. Hazzard relates how a group of African American visionaries, most of whom had been trapped in menial jobs, saw what health-policy experts did not . . . After their new discipline proved its value in saving lives, organized emergency care, like so many arenas in US medicine, excluded the Black men who invented it and effaced the history of what all Americans owe them, but this riveting page-turner brings these medical heroes long-delayed acclaim.
--Harriet Washington, NBCC Award Winning Author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present