Part One: Freedom House: The World’s First Paramedics Were Black Men from Pittsburgh

Margaret talks with Kaveh Hoda about the down-and-out Black men who created the world's first modern paramedic service, way more recently than you'd imagine

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
It's Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
I really thought you were going for things instead of
stuff there, and I thought you were going to change
the show kind of because that's what gets said to
me half the time is a most show title, and
I thought you were going to do it for your
own show. I got really excited.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
No, Actually, what's funny is earlier, when I was workshopping
how I was going to do a terrible jingle to
start the episode, I was like, man, things is a
more poetic or a more sing song y word and
stuff like things would actually work better there. But that's
not the name of the show. There's a different show
called Cool People Who Did Cool Things, and it's a

(00:46):
terrible show run by nightmare people. It's the inversion of
this show. But this is Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
I'm your host, Murder Kiljoy and with me today as
my guest is doctor cave Hoda, who is host of
House of Pod, which is a podcast of medical advice

(01:07):
from your doctor that you can take as actual medical
advice instead of going to the doctor.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
Is that accurate? Lies? The wrong? But lies? I see
what you did? That mean? Mean lies? Hurtful, hurtful untruths.
It's all pretty much accurate. It is a medical type show.
It's like medically adjacent, not too far into the weeds.

(01:36):
I tend to not try to not give medical advice
that much, but we talk about medical things quite a bit.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
See see whenever we have like someone on the show
who's like one of my friends, I asked Margaret to
roast them slightly for just for me, for.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Me, it's true as well as a discussion that happened
before you came on.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
I deserve it, I deserve it, I need it, keep
me in my place. It's fantastic.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
I was like, please humble my dear friend.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, because doctors don't work hard enough. They need to
be Yeah, clearly. Also on the call is our producer Sophie. Sophie,
Hi happy. I guess we did one New Year episode,
but this is the first New Year actual episode.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
Yeah, it's nice to see Sophie. Happy New Year to you.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
Oh my gosh, thank you so much. We're in the
Year of the wood Dragon. Did you know.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
Didn't live in the woods.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Both are cool. But we talked about a zodiac thing
or is this the Chinese.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
Chinese New Year thing? I only know this because I
will have a niece born this year and anything that
I can find out about this specific year.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
But it's not just a regular dragon. It's a wood dragon.
Said wood dragon, huh, but with interpretations are exciting. Wow.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
Year of the wood Dragon, which was also uh. I
don't know what that means now I want to know
symbolizes spring and is about expansion and getting stronger, which
is really cool because I'm gonna have a niece this
year and I would like her.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
I'm strong kind of need some of that energy. Yeah,
look at that wood dragon energy going on twenty.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Twenty in order to find water during the hipocalypse, and well,
this is cool.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
This one Google search that I found it says that
this year will be refreshing and there will be renewal
and growth and it will be alluring with the dynamic
and energy of the dragon.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
I'm just more lies, more lies. This is a show
of lies.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
You're on the wrong podcast.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
This one will cool and.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
We're we're this one's and actually actually this time, like
often it's like, well, I mean nothing ends well, but
that's true for all life. Yeah, so have you ever
heard of medicine?

Speaker 3 (04:03):
God? It does it sounds familiar. It sounds Oh no,
I do it. Yes, I do know it. You're one
of the other doctors. You're one of a medical doctors. No,
I'm a medicine medicine. I'm a medical doctor. Yeah, no,
I have heard of medicine. This is good. We're off
to a good start because.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
I have as an episode about medicine. Well, before I
tell you anything about medicine, because you don't know anything
about medicine. First, I'm going to tell you that this
episode was edited by Daniel, So everyone needs to say,
hi Danel before we move on. Hi Danel, Hi Danel,
Hi Danel. Our theme music was written for us by Unwomany. Okay, So,

(04:42):
now that we've established the concept of medicine, what about
emergency medical services?

Speaker 3 (04:46):
You ever heard of that?

Speaker 2 (04:48):
I have?

Speaker 3 (04:49):
I have, I have worked with it, I have received it.
I am familiar with the concept of it to some degree. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
Excellent, Okay, because this episode is about that. This week
we're going to tell a story about what is presented
as the world's first paramedics. Anytime anyone says the world's
first anything, I just instinctively don't believe it. But sure,
but very much the modern concept of paramedics absolutely very cool,
and how they were black men in Pittsburgh a shockingly

(05:20):
recent time ago. You ever heard of Freedom House and
the ambulance service there? I have not, I don't think
so I'm excited. I was like, I was like, oh, man,
I have no idea how common I know the story
is in the doctor field.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
I'm a blank slate. Draw upon me at your will. Okay.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
If you were to guess when modern paramedics came around,
what decade would you guess?

Speaker 3 (05:44):
Okay, decade? I would have boy, Okay, if I'm being
honest and not thinking of this as a trick question, yeah,
I probably would have thought the sixties. That's true. Yeah,
is that anyway I get right? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (05:57):
No, yeah, absolutely, nineteen sixty eight, yeah, swine with doctors
modern paramedics. I would have guessed like the thirteen hundreds
or something. You know, if I had been coming at
this right.

Speaker 3 (06:09):
Like the ideas you said decades to me, I know
you're right, right, That's how I knew. If you said,
like what year, I might have said like seven hundred
and thirty eight BC or something like that. But I've
totally been off. But because you said decades. That's when
I that's when I was like, wait a minute, I
only have a couple options here.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
Okay, no, they see that makes sense because in my mind,
I'd be like, you know which decade you'd be talking about,
the eighteen fifties, the eighteen sixties, the eighteen seventies. But
that was because when I first started doing the show,
everything was in the eighteen hundreds, and I would constantly
get everything mixed up.

Speaker 3 (06:40):
And all right, So.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
These folks Freedom House they went on after forming nineteen
sixty eight. They went on to run the non military
world's first modern emergency medical service for about seven years
before classic nemesis of the pod systemic racism brings them down.

(07:03):
But along the way, they basically invented modern emergency medical services,
which spread across the country and the world. So they succeeded.
They won, They did that.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
They did, but I've never heard of them, unfortunately, and
I feel really bad. Well, and that's the thing. It's like,
until only a couple of years ago, this story was
not very told or known, and then even now you know,
like I, like I said, I had no idea about
any of this, But I'm also not in the medical field.
But I think that most people in the medical field
also don't know this. I think you're right. Most people

(07:36):
in medical field don't even know about Tuskegee at this point,
much less this, which is I mean, I don't have
numbers on that, but like I certainly practitioners.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
Don't know about the Tuskegee medical experiments.

Speaker 3 (07:52):
Did you just look that up?

Speaker 1 (07:53):
No?

Speaker 3 (07:53):
I made that up? Okay, I was going to say
that was amazing for that quick.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
No, No.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
So Freedom House the opposite of the Tuskegee Medical Experiences, which,
if this is a very different style of show, we
would cover. But we will not be covering on this
show unless I find people who like fought against it
with guns, in which case I'll absolutely cover it one day.
Freedom House is a couple dozen black men, many of
them without high school degrees, many of them with felony records,

(08:21):
some of them with no place to live, pretty much
none of them with any medical experience, who saved just
uncountable millions of lives by the standards they set, as
well as the like hundreds and thousands of lives that
they saved directly and personally on the street. And while
people haven't heard of them. I'm not a big medical knower.

(08:42):
I'm more of a like squeamish as hell type. In
order to go to first aid trainings, I disassociate and
then when I get hurt or someone else gets hurt,
I redisassociate and then use the knowledge that I learn
will disassociated.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
You have like fugue power that's like a mutant power
you can like tap into like that other person and
then you tap out. It's amazing. Yeah, no, it works.
It's terrible.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
Like I remember one time, I like was in a
squat in the South Bronx and I stabbed my self
in the palm while trying to cut open a very
stale bagel, and blood like shot out across the room
and everyone just looked at me with like blank eyes,
and I was like, cool, I have to deal with this.
So I just completely disassociated, remembered what I know about

(09:24):
stab wounds and how to irrigate them.

Speaker 3 (09:27):
And that's fine. It's like ninety eight percent of practicing medicine. Man,
you think that's like what I do. That's like I
constantly disassociating at work. I'm like, that's all I do constantly.
I don't of them makes me there.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, that honestly makes sense. So as squeamish as I am,
I have heard of a ton of their innovations, and
I suspect you have heard and or used many of them.
But before we talk about their innovations.

Speaker 1 (09:54):
Oh kay, is it time? Is it time for your
favorite thing? It is?

Speaker 3 (09:57):
It's time for context.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
Yes, nothing makes Magpie happier besides rendraw being like, I'm
going to do a whole podcast on a thing, but
first I'm going to give you forty minutes of context.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
Yeah wait, real quick, Margaret, can I can? I? Can
I call you Magpie too? Or is that absolutely okay?
Magpie is just short for Margaret.

Speaker 1 (10:20):
I like that's great, Okay, sorry, well she's such a Magpie.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
Actually got the name Margaret in reverse. I was collecting
random shiny objects and my friends started calling me Magpie.
I also used to steal a lot, and so my
friends called me Magpie. These random shiny objects on people's wrists,
well usually they were in stores, okay, not independent stores,
only corporate chain stores, but also like weird shiny things

(10:48):
off the street. I used to make jewelry out of
like rusty washers and things, but podcasting paste better true.
So okay, so the history of emergency medical care or
a street medicine, I would guess that maybe we shouldn't
just like let people die after they get hurt. Has
been a human instinct, probably as long as we've been humans,

(11:10):
probably since before we were humans. But the modern concept
of emergency medical services is shockingly new. There have been
many attempts over the years. Granted, whenever I say the
first time someone did this, I assume that they mean
in the European context, you know, And so most of
what I'm like, oh, here are the early ems services.

(11:31):
I'm going to be talking mostly about Europe and the
United States because that is the history that I found.
But the first recorded story, it's an anecdote about emergency
medical care, is a bit of folklore and it comes
out of Palestine, and it's been passed down through oral
and written traditions. There was this like kind of proto

(11:52):
socialist Jewish guy who lived a thousand years ago in Palestine,
and his name was Jesus of Nazareth.

Speaker 1 (12:00):
Sounds sounds slightly familiar.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
Yeah, No, people like he still has kind of a following.
Oh he ran kind of like a mutual aid cult
of beggars and sex workers, which is unfortunately not what
most of his modern following.

Speaker 3 (12:13):
He's about what do is modern people into only good things? Okay? Cool?

Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah, yeah, no, totally cool. But he got snitched out.
The state killed him in a weird old timey brutal way.
He's all right, he's pretty cool, kind of classic love
the band, hate the fan kind of way. And he
tells a story about the Good Samaritan where a guy
got just jumped on the road and he's left for
dead and a lot of people walk right by him,

(12:41):
including a priest, and then the Samaritan guy bandages him
up and puts him on a donkey to take him
to an inn. It's a little bit of an odd
way to phrase the whole story because Samaritan's actually an
ethnoreligious group that developed parallel to Judaism. But to this day,
good Samaritan laws are the laws that protect Like me,
if I'm walking down the street and I see someone

(13:02):
hurt and I'm like, I'm my help, and I make
it worse. You know, you work to the limit of
your knowledge. It's sort of like my understanding of it, right,
that makes sense to me? Yeah, yeah, I wonder, so
it would be different, like would you be protected to
a higher level or would you be like more at
risk because you're a medical doctor.

Speaker 3 (13:24):
I think probably more at risk. But yeah, I think
in most situations it's never stopped me from doing something
like on a plane or at like a party or
a concert, because if a reasonable person can say he
did everything that he could at that moment, then I
feel like I'm okay. If they say this person was

(13:46):
trying to do something way beyond his means and he
had an option to get this patient somewhere else, then
I would be at risk. So I mean, if I
feel like a car breaks down in a woman goes
into labor and I try to deliver her with a
cesarean section, which I have no idea. I mean, I

(14:06):
haven't even been in on one of those since in
medical school, and I had the option of taking them
to the hospital myself, I think I would be liable.
You know, I'd have to really prove that there was
no option I had to do it. You know that
makes some sense to me. Yeah, I mean I shouldn't
be doing those things unless like there's zero zero other option.

Speaker 1 (14:28):
Has it happened, It's happened to you, or you've been
on a plane and they've been like, there's anybody in
a doctor here, It's happened to my brother.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
Oh yeah, it happens all the time. I tell it.
I love it. I love it.

Speaker 1 (14:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:37):
I mean people say they don't love it. It's liars
because the plane rides are so boring for the most part,
and it helps distract me. And it's like fun and
you go when you do your thing, it's usually nothing
too big or dramatic, but it's kind of fun sometimes
and then afterwards they give you like miles and they
give you wine sometimes and they're like they treat you nice.
Sometimes sometimes they don't do anything, but like you know,

(14:59):
it's a yeah, and just if nothing else, it's just like,
I don't know, it helps break up the day a
little bit. It's fun.

Speaker 2 (15:06):
Everyone else on the plane is terrified while this is happening,
but I.

Speaker 3 (15:11):
Appreciate that disassociating again again.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
Yeah, So there's that whole meme of the like you know,
the when someone has the degree that the doctorate that's
not medical and they're they're like parents on the plane
and is like could have been you, but they didn't
need someone to talk about the history of like Samaria,
you know, and in this case, well, it never comes
up that people need podcasters.

Speaker 3 (15:33):
It's weird. Someday someone's gonna need avy help. That's where
where you come in.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
Yeah, well these anyway, Okay, So fast forward twelve hundred
years or so since that, the mutual aid cult, thirteenth
century Florence. There's this story that I don't believe it's presented.
It was not presented as an anecdote in the histories
that I read, but I don't believe it. Thirteenth century Florence.
I believe that they did the thing. I think that

(16:01):
how it, I'll just say it. Some Italians decided to
go all in on doing cool aesthetic shit while helping people,
and that's cool. Supposedly they were all drinking at this
bar all the time, but since they were all Christians,
they had a swear jar and every time someone would cuss,
they'd put money into the swear jar. The reason that
I don't believe this is that I was like, this
seems fishy, and I like googled around about swear jars,

(16:22):
and they seem to be Since about the eighteen nineties.

Speaker 3 (16:24):
We also like I've met Italians, you feel like we
would do that.

Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah, but hanging out in a bar thing and coming
up with wacky ideas absolutely okay. So they do a
cool thing. They have enough money through whatever means that
they all dress in heavy robes and went around carrying
people who needed care to the hospital on like crimson litters,

(16:50):
and they called themselves the Brothers of Mercy, and they
would arrive anywhere that people told a bell requesting their help.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
What is litter?

Speaker 2 (16:58):
I'm sorry, Oh yeah, it's a oh and like the
I think if you're carrying someone on a litter, it's
also that way of like if you're carrying someone over
your head because they're like the king and you're old king,
you know. But I think it also just in this
case is probably a crimson stretcher. So they were cool.

(17:20):
They were at least esthetically interesting, but they didn't last.
It didn't catch on or spread. It seemed to last
I don't know, like a generation or so or less.
There is one big organized activity that has taught humans
a lot about emergency medicine, war, which makes sense. War
is when a bunch of people go around and put

(17:41):
each other in the condition where they need emergency medicine.
In Napoleon's army, they systematize carrying surgeons around and started
doing like triage and shit. And I've read so many
times in my life have been like and this is
when they first did triage. And I'm like, I've read
this about so many different places. Sometimes, right, Yeah, I
suspect that person's bleeding out and that person's not is

(18:03):
also a really old concept. But you know what else
is a really old concept.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
Advertising You guys are good? Yeah, are good?

Speaker 2 (18:16):
Yeah, this is what they would need on an airplane.
They'd be like, help, we need to go to ads.

Speaker 3 (18:21):
And I'd be like, we need a segue here.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
Yeah, I'd be like, I'm so good at segues, especially
ones that are like slightly ironic but still encurt Why
don't actually encourage any of you to buy any of
these things? But here they are interrupting your listening unless
you listen to cooler zone media.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
Wow, brave.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
And we're back. Okay.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
So there's like warfing is teaching everyone's stuff. And then
I actually curious, have you have you heard about this
whole thing about the way that knowledge of tourniquits has
changed in the past couple decades. No, I don't think
so as I understand it. Like when I was a
boy scout, which is where I met my first friend
who went trance before me. When I was a boy scout,
I learned how you should put tourniquits on people in

(19:13):
the woods, and also that if you ever do this,
the person will lose their limb.

Speaker 3 (19:17):
You know.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
The idea around tourniquets in the nineties was tourniquet is
the absolute last resort and you are sacrificing the limb
to save the life. Then the US decided have a
global war on terror, because all war things are euphemisms,
and the Global War on Terror was not a whatever.
Everyone probably knows how I feel about that, and the

(19:39):
US was put into a state of near permanent war.
So people got an awful lot of data, and now
people have way better understandings of tourniquets, and now it
doesn't usually mean losing the limb, and you can help
them on for way longer than people assumed. So good
old war, yay, Okay. Back into the past. Emergency medicine

(20:00):
at cholera. It fucked up the non European world for
a while, but then the histories that I read didn't
care about that, but then in eighteen thirty one it
hit the UK. I'm going to quote a historian named
Kevin Hazzard who wrote his book American Sirens, which is
the main book that kind of broke this story around
Freedom House. But it talks a lot of very good book.

(20:23):
I'm going to quote this because it's a perfect nothing
ever changes moment. We're talking about the cholera epidemic. When
it reached the UK in eighteen thirty one, cholera still
had no identifiable cause or cure. People were terrified it
killed quickly and indiscriminately. Widespread fear of infection, along with
anger over the government's inability to stop it, led residents
to distrust Parliament and embrace conspiracy theories. Edicts from public

(20:48):
health officials were seen as threats and ignored, while rumors
that doctors admitted patients in the hospital just so they
could kill and dissect them something called burking, spread almost
as quickly as the disease itself. In some cities, the
public rioted, oh.

Speaker 3 (21:03):
The past is hilarious. Yeah, I know, the person so
wacky and harass crazy.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
Then yeah, nothing like that would happen now written.

Speaker 3 (21:15):
For those people. Oh my goodness, yeah, wow, yad, nothing
like that. Now we live We live in a it's
like Star Trek the next generation. That's that's kind of
what we're in right now, that kind of utopia. Yeah, okay,
well there to be fair.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
Star Trek basically says that this is when everything goes
twenty twenty foursts like, wheneverything goes bad, it does you
get the bell riots. I have been watching Lost Star Trek.
You get the bell riots, but you also get you
also get the Irish unifications.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
Like I was like, wow, you really know this off
the top of your head.

Speaker 3 (21:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
No, it's like come up a couple times recently anyway
in London, not in Star trek Land, but back in
cholera the oldie cholera era hospitals were like, even though
we don't totally know what's causing this yet, maybe we
should keep the sick people separate from the healthy people.
And the first hospital based ambulance service started doing that,
showing up to take folks to the hospital, and that

(22:07):
did lower the spread of cholera substantially. It does sound
sinister as hell. I got to admit I don't want
to be with the rioting public about this, but I
understand how like my dad's sick and we don't understand
how disease works, and someone's like, we're taking your father away,
I'd be like, I'd rather you didn't. That would be

(22:27):
a very natural instinct on my part.

Speaker 3 (22:28):
I think, yeah, yeah, I mean nowadays it would be
like you're taking my dad with COVID wear and then
that person ends up in January sixth or something. So yeah,
I know exactly. Yeah, we've sort of taken it to
the next level. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
In the US, in the eighteen sixties, we had the
First American Civil War. I'm just trying to future prove
my episode here, and this abolitionist surgeon named Henry Bowditch
was like, Hey, our ambulances suck, like really bad because
both sides were fielding sort of the least reliable people

(23:03):
as ambulance drivers. It was absolutely the job for like
the drunks and stuff like that, and they didn't pay
much attention to it. Yeah, right, like, anyway, whatever it did,
that guy's too drunk to fight, put them drive something. Yeah, exactly,
what could go wrong? Yeah, And so people are just
dying on the battlefield left and right. All the shooting
at each other didn't help. So Bodich was like, well

(23:26):
what the fuck in Congress was like all right, fine,
and they made the first organized ambulance system in the US,
which later became civilian ambulance services. Though it started off
less is someone's going to show up and do medicine
and more a guy shows up and drives you to
the hospital. New York City, they stepped it up, and
they actually almost invented the paramedic. They like came real close.

(23:50):
They had a whole system that involved telegraphs and runners
and a horse drawn carriage with oil lanterns on all sides.
And then they didn't have a siren, so they had
a foot pedal gong to out of the crowds as
they rode through the streets, which is aesthetic as fuck.
I really like this idea. Modern sirens are probably more effective,
but I like the gong. They also sometimes added medical services.

(24:13):
Sometimes they even would throw a doctor into the mix,
and this started spreading across the country. Some ambulance services
were run by funeral homes or drug stores. Others were
run by police or fire departments, but the have emergency
medical care right here on the street. Part fell apart,
didn't and did not generalize. So most ambulance services are

(24:36):
someone shows up and takes you away, and it's whoever
happens to have a vehicle big enough to throw a
person in, like a hearse. World War One full of
ambulances because the machine gun was invented and it was bad. Yeah, modernized,
I left it. I should not laugh at that.

Speaker 3 (24:55):
No, No, I mean it's fine.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
It's like, well, nothing makes people need the hospital like
a machine gun matched with tactics that have not accepted
the machine gun as part of war.

Speaker 3 (25:07):
Right.

Speaker 2 (25:09):
We mostly talked about World War two, but my god,
World War One, it's a nightmare.

Speaker 3 (25:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
Some soldiers were specialized as medics and got ten weeks
training and then they all came home. And you had
this brief, beautiful renaissance of emergency medical care in the US,
and it didn't last. Hospitals became overwhelmed. Over the next
couple decades, the medical system in general was like pushed
to its limit. No more medical services for ambulances. So

(25:36):
it's cops and firefighters and funeral homes are running the
medical services again, or rather, the ambulance services, and some
of them weren't happy about it. Some of them were like,
I don't know, whatever, it's fine, it's like money and
we don't care, right, And that was kind of the
attitude of most ambulance services. And I don't know if
you knew this, but cops in the US don't have
a great track record when it comes to race reals.

Speaker 3 (26:02):
This is weird. Yeah, we're talking about list way long ago.
Oh ken, this stuff this past. I'm learning so much, Jesus.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
Imagine if you have a heart attack and a fucking
hears and morticians show up to take you to the
hospital or and that can't be good for your morale, right.
I feel like a lot of stay alive in crisis
is based on like faith and hope and like caring
and belief, you know. Or imagine having a heart attack
and then a cop who hassled you last week shows

(26:30):
up with a gun. Also you have all of these
Like it was literally like when cops would show up,
they would be like, if it's a white, clean shaven man,
it's a heart attack. If it's not a white man,
or they're not clean shaven, they're drunk drunk, you know,
And so all these people would just die of heart
attacks because they'd be like, didn't shave in three days,

(26:50):
or happen to be born not white. So, despite the
lies about progress being a linear thing, in nineteen fifties America,
your standard of care from an ambulance was hey, the
fuck lower than eighteen nineties New York City. In nineteen
sixty six, the National Research Council put out a paper
called Accidental Death and Disability, The Neglected Disease of Modern Society,

(27:12):
and it was kind of a call to arms about
how bad should have gotten in the US. It claimed
that a US soldier shot on the battlefield in Vietnam
had better chances of survival than the same American in
a car accident on the highway of California. Wow, And
people were like, that doesn't seem so right. Yeah, And
it's because the soldier has other soldiers who are there

(27:32):
and performing medical care. Okay, that's the medical context. We
figured that part out. Now we're going to talk about
the neighborhood it happened in in Pittsburgh. It's called the
Hill District. And it means I can tie in the
Haitian Revolution because that is now on y'all's bingo card everyone.
The Haitian Revolution now shows up in everything that is
American related. I haven't even done an episode about the

(27:53):
Haitian Revolution yet.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
I'm gonna I have a question talk that that's tuberculosis
come up in this episode twice.

Speaker 3 (28:03):
This is the bingo. Okay, it's basically the free space. Honestly,
TV is a major player in history. It makes sense.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah, yeah, totally, and just more than I had expected.
It's like, it's just not something that was like part
of my world growing up.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
You know.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
It's the inverse quicksand. I grew up being told quicksand
was a problem. Yeah, you know, it's everywhere. Yeah, turns
out as TB, especially in history and or the non
developed world and or underserved communities.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
I actually spent time storing in my brain enough space
to learn how to get out of quicksand if I
ever fell into quicksand, Like that was actually something I
like read about, and I was like, Okay, I am
prepared if this happens like that that space could be
taken up with like the Creb cycle or some important

(28:58):
scientific fact. But instead that's what that's what's in there
right now. Yeah, and who knows. You know, we're all
going to be eating cake. There's some word here eating
your hat. Yeah, eating crow, eating crow, that's right, not
hats or cake much more. Anyway.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
That's also something that Margaret does all the time. She
know things she thinks she knows, like a slogan or something,
or it does not.

Speaker 3 (29:26):
I thought you were saying she eats crows. I was like,
that's interesting. I mean that I could.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
See, yeah, we could all be eating crows. As I'm
a Corvids, I believe in the supremacy of magpies among
the corvids.

Speaker 3 (29:40):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
So, the Hill District in Pittsburgh is the oldest black
community in Pittsburgh and it was founded by free black
folks a long ass time ago, by free black soldiers
in the Revolutionary Army, like literally since before the US
was the US. The Hill District was founded in eighteen
oh four. Haiti was like, well, they had actually decided
this a while ago, but they succeeded four. They were like,
what if instead of being a slave country, we kick

(30:03):
out or kill all of our oppressors instead, And so
they did that, and this sets the US to trembling
in its boots. I don't know if both countries have boots,
but if they do, us absolutely trembling. Florida might be
the boot, and so they might have been trembling in that,
which would particularly make sense because it was owned by Spain.

Speaker 3 (30:21):
Anyway. Yeah, oh that's true. That one is absolutely okay.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
So the place that all the black people lived in
Pittsburgh got called Little Haiti. This is not because they
were Haitian. This is because they were black and people
were afraid of them. This wasn't even necessarily former enslaved people.
This was free whatever. Anyway, during the nineteen tens or so, Italians,
Irish and Eastern European Jews moved there too, basically all
the undesirable white people, and the black population kept growing

(30:50):
there as well. They did not get displaced by this
influx of sort of ethnic whites, and soon it became
the center of culture in Pittsburgh, basically because it was
the seen of jazz. Unfortunately, slumlords owned almost all of it,
so the place was not well kept, and the tuberculosis
rates were three times the city's average. There's there's number one, Sophie.

(31:13):
I think it's two. I think there's two references. That's
number one.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
I'm just gonna take a drink just for no reason.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
All.

Speaker 2 (31:19):
Yeah, in the nineteen fifties, the US went through this
shit called urban renewal, which was where they gutted black
and other minority neighborhoods across the country, Like, I mean,
gentrification sucks, but this is like it where they're also
just like it's like wrecking ball gentrification. And the Hill
District was no exception. The Hill District was right on

(31:41):
the edge of downtown, so it was perfect to just
like bock up, and they just fucked it up. As
James Baldwin put it in nineteen sixty three, urban renewal
means Negro removal. All the city planners were like, what
if we just cleared everyone out and leveled the whole place,
and then they called it the renaissance. You know, conditions

(32:03):
were so bad that a lot of the black leaders
in the community were actually okay with this because they
were being promised by the city that new housing would
get built and that there would be affordable housing and
you know, more units of housing and better jobs and
all this shit that like they were going to be
lifted up as well. That didn't happen. Spoiler alert, weird.

(32:27):
Thousands of buildings were destroyed, old churches, jazz clubs, homes,
a stop on the underground railroad, all just wrecking bald.
Eight thousand residents were displaced, two thirds of them were black,
and the city didn't follow through on the fifteen thousand
housing units they promised, so shit just got so much worse.
It went from a bad slum to a bad slum

(32:48):
that was worse than the previous version of the bad
slum since it suffered under systemic racism. It's not a
surprise that the Hill was the center point of riots
after Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated in nineteen sixty
eight and four thousand National Guardsmen showed up. They didn't
show up to stop the rioting in the black neighborhood.
They showed up to encircle the hill and make sure

(33:11):
that none of the rioters left the black neighborhood. And
that part stood out to me because whenever black communities
get really mad about murder, pearl clutching racists are all like,
why do black people burn their own neighborhoods down, and like, well,
in this context, it's because the National Guardsmen literally physically
prevented them from going anywhere.

Speaker 3 (33:33):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
That's the neighborhood, the Hill. Now the organization's background, I know,
I'm just like really excited this.

Speaker 3 (33:41):
Whole all right.

Speaker 2 (33:43):
So there's this a guy named Jim McCoy and he's
living on the Hill. He'd been born in Houston. He
moved to Pittsburgh alone, and he worked most of his
life in steel mills as a bricklayer, and he was
a black labor activist. He was elected president of his
local steel workers' union, but then he quit labor, both
like labor union work and then also just like literally
working labor jobs in order to work full time as

(34:06):
a civil rights activist with the NAACP. He got arrested
for civil rights shit all the time. He basically just
did all this stuff. It's a really fucking cool guy.
He was also an entrepreneur who believed in the power
of black owned businesses, and so we set up a
place called Freedom House Enterprises, which existed to help grow

(34:26):
black owned businesses. Basically it ran like job training and
mostly in landscaping and domestic work and like kind of
lower entry but still skilled labor jobs. In order to
fund for it, he also did this other project that
helped alleviate the food desert, which is that he brought
the grocery store to people and he ran a food

(34:48):
store van where he drove around in a van, and
not just him, there was a whole house, a whole
bunch of people did this. We only have one guy's name.
That's the way the history works.

Speaker 3 (34:57):
It sucks.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
They drove around and sold free and they sold the
kind of food that people couldn't get in the area.
And I think it's cool as shit.

Speaker 3 (35:07):
And they got even Yeah, I'm imagining there's a story
in there too where they tried to shut him down
for doing that, like he doesn't have a license to
do that, he can't he gave to go around distributing
food out like that.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
I'm willing to bet that that did happen, except also
there was a little bit of a like everyone was
so afraid of the hill that there was also this.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
Like, I don't know, just leave him alone, just stay
out of there.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
You know, either one would have would have worked. But
what you shouldn't stay out of are these sweet deals
and or podcasts that have paid money that feeds my
dog and me and my dog and me so many

(35:55):
people and dogs.

Speaker 3 (35:57):
I want to get into these podcasts, these commercials and
just moment devol, let's get into it. It's gonna be
so good.

Speaker 2 (36:02):
Here they are.

Speaker 3 (36:13):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (36:13):
And if you had cooler zone media, you'd be missing
out right now because you didn't get to hear those ads. Okay,
now the final piece of context.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
Aw man, that means you're going to be less happy
the rest of the recording.

Speaker 3 (36:31):
I've never seen anyone enjoy context this much, and I
love that she loves it this much.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
She loves context so good because it changes everything about
like it's what gives it the flavor anyway.

Speaker 1 (36:44):
She's just a context girly. What can you what can
you cox?

Speaker 3 (36:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (36:48):
It's partly because like I didn't care about history when
I was younger, because everything was just these disassociated facts.

Speaker 1 (36:54):
Yeah, and they were most of what we were taught
in schools was lieser.

Speaker 3 (37:00):
Yeah. No, you're like a contextista. It's great. Yeah, yeah, yay.
The man who developed CPR. He ever heard of Peter Saffer? Yes,
I have heard the name.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Yeah, Okay, he's cool as shit, and so I'm gonna
tell you about him.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
Let's do it.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
The guy who invented CPR, was also the doctor behind
Freedom House's ambulance service, in the world's first paramedics, and
a bunch of other shit, and he had a fucking
wild life. He didn't get a choice in having a
wild life because he was born in nineteen twenty four
in Austria, and unless you died as a child, if

(37:38):
you were born in nineteen twenty four in Austria, you
did not have a boring life. He also probably didn't
have a good life. He was born in Austria. He
was also born with faint Jewish ancestry. His mother's grandmother
was Jewish, which is so bonus, not good fun times.
His father was a doctor who was fired when he

(37:58):
refused to join the Nazi party, and his mother was
also a doctor and she was fired because she had
that Jewish grandmother. And both of his parents were avowed Pacifists,
and he grew up in a very political household. When
he was thirteen, he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth,
which is like, we could just leave it there and

(38:18):
be awful. You could be like, oh, yeah, the founder's
CPR was a Nazi. He immediately quit, and since he
was of mixed heritage. They let him quit because he
was like not whatever.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
Any he said, you guys don't want me come on, yeah,
exactly school, this guy Franz takes my spot. I'm out
of here this Yeah, he could go die a fine.
Yeah he's into that stuff. Look at him. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
After high school, the Nazis were like, great, you finished
high school, Go dig ditches. And so he did that
for a while and they were like, great, now we're
conscripting you into the Nazi army. And he immediately got
a medical release due to exima and he like broke
out in a case bad enough to hospitalize him. Like
if you read just the like Cliff's Notes version of
his life, it's just kind of like and then he
like got out due to exema and I'm like, huh,

(39:05):
but he like almost he got real sick.

Speaker 3 (39:07):
It's interesting. I'm wondering the story behind that. I'm wondering.
I'm wondering it was like there's certain types of exma
that you can get from exposure to things that give
you allergies, like nickel or something. So I'm wondering if
there was.

Speaker 2 (39:20):
Coat got real wet in a rainstorm. I don't know
anything about medicine.

Speaker 3 (39:26):
Well it might have been lined with something. I was
assuming this person did this to themselves, like cover themselves
material the Yeah, I like that.

Speaker 1 (39:37):
Margaret was just like, yes, Orr not a doctor.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
Yeah, I am your doctor though, not you, but the listener.
I am the listener's doctor. And if you want to
not be in the Nazis, you can well okay. So
so he gets sent to the hospital because of his exema,
and then his parents basically pull strings with all of this.
All their friends were all doctors, right, and so they

(40:02):
kind of juggle him around to keep him out of
joining the Nazi army and having to go die on
the Eastern Front, which is absolutely what it would have
happened if he had like eighty percent of his class
died on the Eastern Front, oh you know, of his
high school graduating class. And so they were like, oh, yeah, no,
he totally still has EXIMA. Send him over there, and

(40:24):
they would just like juggle him around to keep him
away from the Nazi doctors. And then there was a
surprise inspection at the hospital and he absolutely didn't have
XHM anymore. So he went and smeared his skin with
toxic ointment used to test four tuberculosis. No, yep, and
he gave himself a mystery skin rash.

Speaker 1 (40:45):
I'm definitely drinking like a organic kurbamonte.

Speaker 3 (40:49):
Yeah, yeah, totally, but it's still fun. Okay, I basically
don't drink.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
So one day we should do an episode that actually
we do as a drinking cake with all of the things.

Speaker 3 (41:02):
I've never been more excited. That's really brilliant.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
Yeah, that'll be like when we need a special reward
for if we'd run a fundraiser or something.

Speaker 1 (41:12):
Yeah, I was gonna say we could. We could, like
we could like twitch stream it and raise some money
for a yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
So he gives himself this nasty again. It's like if
you read the Cliffsnes version, he's like, yeah, he put
an annointment on him that gave him a weird rash.
And then like the other the more in depth thing
is like he almost died. He almost killed himself by
putting toxin all over his body. And so they show
up and they're like, here's this like scrawny guy who's
sick as hell. He is not a good soldier. So

(41:41):
they give him permanent medical leave and he gets work
as an orderly at a hospital he's treating, and then
eventually he starts working and he goes to medical school.
He's treating victims of Allied bombing raids, and with the
help of some officials, he manages to hide his lineage
on his med squapplic So nineteen forty three, starts med

(42:02):
school and he keeps working in the hospital, and then
there's this like fun story. All of the history is
absolutely like, I'm sure he also treated Nazis, you know,
that's the like all of the versions of this guy
was coolest shit, and so all of the versions like
he treated victims of the Allied bombing raids, and I'm like,
I'm sure, Yeah, he treated all kinds of people. And

(42:22):
I'm not trying to come at him for that. I
just like hate when history kind of try to sugarcoat it.

Speaker 3 (42:28):
Yeah, but is his job, Like I mean, I wouldn't
want to, but if that's my job, that if I
made it, I had it. There's a whole oath I
took to help people, you know, I mean, like that's
what he has to do.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
And he also almost killed himself to not join the
Nazi army. Yeah, I mean he did his bit. Yeah,
So when the Red army approached Vienna. The SS tried
to like take over the hospital to use it for
a base, but the staff blocked them. They were like, no,
we'll treat your sick, but we're not fucking letting you

(43:02):
take over the hospital. They tipped over a bus to
not let the Nazis in, right, And then when they
were getting around anyway, one doctor it was actually this
guy's mentor whatever the big name is, the guy who
I'm excuse mentor was.

Speaker 3 (43:17):
It Cohen Hoven? By a chance, that's a guy I
know that worked with Okay, no, no, I don't. I don't.
I didn't write down. He puts on a general's uniform
that he has a Nazi general's uniform, probably because a
Nazi general died in the hospital, right, good thing to have.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
Yeah, And he just like goes down and is like, hello,
I am a Nazi general, I am more general, and
you can't be here. You must go away, and they
were like, we love authority, and they like turned around
and left.

Speaker 3 (43:46):
You know, that is awesome. I hope that's true because
that is an amazing story. Now I actually believe that one.
It seems like most of the like wild bravery World
War II stories pan out, you know, like most of
them seem to have happened. People did wild shit in
that's all too, that's so awesome.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
On his twenty first birthday in nineteen forty five, the
Red Army liberated Vienna and he was like fucking stoked.
He finished med school in nineteen forty eight. He got
the fuck out of Europe. It was less that it
is like, I mean, there's probably a lot of bad
memories there for him too, but he didn't like the
European method of medical stuff, which was very bureaucratic and
formal and like do things the old way instead of

(44:27):
the new way. He is absolutely a like I got
to do things my way kind of guy. So first
he goes Connecticut Continuous Studies and he's like funding it
by installing TV antennas on rooftops. But by nineteen fifty
he's like, you know who I miss I missed the
girl I was dating when I lived in Vienna. So
two years later he goes back. They haven't like stayed together,

(44:48):
but they start corresponding again. He goes back and he
proposes to this woman Eva.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
Wait, is he a cool wife guy from history?

Speaker 2 (44:56):
He is, yes, and you know what's wild. He's a
workaholic doctor wife. Guy in history.

Speaker 3 (45:05):
Never heard of such a thing. Nonsense. It was like,
you guys are more lies from this podcast's doing.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
I have a friend who's kind of like that.

Speaker 3 (45:14):
Yeah, no, totally turns out you can do it all. Sure.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
Allegedly he's like, well, you go to the US with me,
and she's like, I will go to the moon with you.
And they were married for fifty two years until his death.
They go to Peru for a while to like do
medicine there, or he's doing medicine, and I actually don't
know her job, but she does come up a lot
in this story as being specifically directly supportive of the

(45:41):
kind of not just his medical work, but the like
making the medical world better work. She's a big part
of helping that. By nineteen fifty four, they moved to Baltimore,
the Greatest city in America. That's their slogan, but I
also is it. Yeah, sometimes it's like on their park benches.
It used to be the city that reads. Unfortunately, city
slogans are usually the thing that are aspirational but not true.

(46:03):
But it's mostly an episode about Pittsburgh, but Baltimore doesn't
get enough love. And it's the closest thing I have
to a home city. So it's the greatest city in America.
In Baltimore, he invented CPR. CPR is invented in Baltimore
by an anti fascist Austrian immigrant, and I think that's
coolest shit, that's really cool. He didn't invent it alone.
He worked with teams the entire time, and they built

(46:25):
on existing ideas, both emergency breathing and physical massacressions of
the heart. Yeah, compressions of the heart from outside the
body were things that had been discussed in previous literature
from like eighty plus years prior and weren't in practice
and like weren't being used. And he was like, no,

(46:46):
this is what we're going to fucking do. He wrote
a book called The ABC's of Resuscitation, which I can
only assume from the title as a children's book.

Speaker 3 (46:56):
And that's something. Sorry, you're probably got to mention it now.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
There's a reason we have you as a doctor on
this fucking.

Speaker 3 (47:03):
You know, they talk about ABC's. That's something that if
it's the same thing airway breathing circulation, it's just the
thought process of people to go through during this during CPR,
that's almost certainly what it is. Yeah, but I'm just like,
I'm pretty impressed at actually if that is the case,
If this is something that was developed in like what nineteen.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
Sixties, nineteen fifties right now, nineteen fifties right now. Yeah,
and it's still like lasts to this day. It's pretty cool,
you know, if that's if that is, And I'm sure
it is, because I it would be an awesome kids book,
but it's probably not just that. So yeah, yeah, I
put in the kid's book as a joke, but yeah, no,
I did almost certainly because it was like the manual
for a very long time.

Speaker 3 (47:43):
Yeah, that's really cool. I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (47:46):
The way that he and his team studied CPR, he
says he later in life, was like would be illegal later.
The way they did it is that they sedated and
then paralyzed volunteers and then tried different methods to keep
them breathing. Oh and to be fair, they had like
emergency breathing apparatus, like machines that would do the breathing.

(48:08):
I don't know the right word here.

Speaker 3 (48:10):
Ventilators.

Speaker 2 (48:11):
Yeah, they had ventilators like right there, you know, so
it was like, you try this for thirty seconds and
if it doesn't work, you like run and put them
back on the thing or whatever. Also, the thing that
kind of when I first read this is like, god,
damn it. You know, the thirty two volunteers they were paid.
They were paid one hundred and fifty bucks each. And
they were all doctors, nurses, and med students. So it

(48:31):
wasn't lay people like it wasn't like poor people off
the street getting paid to be almost killed medically.

Speaker 3 (48:38):
You know all these old experiments they used to be
done on like med students. I was just reading about
this one study where they wanted to like see what
amount of blood can be or GI systems, an old
old study like before it shows up in your poop
as like dark tari stuff. And so what do you do.
You just get a bunch of medical students and you
just make them drink blood, just drink blood, and they're like, oh,

(49:00):
they come back to this much. Yeah right, I took
this much blood until the poop turned colors. Medical students
had to be put through everything back in the day
was terrible.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
Yeah, well, but then they like grow up to become
doctors who then test things on themselves. Like, yes, I
was talking to my physician's assistant friend of mine as
I was researching this episode, and I was telling him
I was really excited about this stuff. And I was
like telling him at this part and he was like, yeah,
I mean the way they tested anesthesia was that doctors
would like look at their watch and then take a
bunch of drugs and see you look at their watch.

Speaker 3 (49:31):
When they woke up again. You know.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
That was this guy. He also was an anesthesiologist who
did a lot of the work around testing and different
anesthesia drugs, and he would just do it on himself.
I suspect you often did it in more controlled environments
where like there was other people around, you know, right right,
But in these CPR experiments, basically he was comparing to
a previous way. Instead of emergency breathing, people were doing

(49:56):
this thing where they like lift you by the arms,
like from behind, and they're like, oh it like and
he was like, that seems like bullshit. I bet that
doesn't work. And so they tested it and they were like,
that doesn't work at all, and then emergency breathing does
work at all. And specifically he proved that lay people
could be taught, like in a matter of minutes, how

(50:19):
to do rescue breathing enough to save people's lives. And
so some of the first experiments involved ten year old
boy scouts and also Eva. His wife came in was like,
all right, it seems important to you. I'll come do
this stuff.

Speaker 3 (50:33):
Help you knock out these kids.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
Yeah, oh no, the kids aren't. The kids aren't going under.
The kids are doing the emergency breathing. Oh good, okay,
And so they're showing that this like seventy pound kid
can emergency breathe for like a three hundred pound man,
you know, and it worked. Rescue breathing is an incredibly
effective method of continuing to have oxygen cheer brain. And

(50:55):
he filmed the experiments and toward the country to show
people in nineteen fifty seven, and doctors around the world
were like this fucking rules. Doctors in the US were like,
you can't teach lay people how to do medical stuff.
They'll hurt people. And also it's icky that you must
kiss the person.

Speaker 3 (51:13):
That remained a problem.

Speaker 2 (51:14):
Yeah. He had to finally came up with some fucking
whole device that was like, you can use this instead.
It doesn't serve a medical purpose. It's less effective than
just putting your mouth on someone.

Speaker 3 (51:25):
Yeah, well you're probably gonna mention this. But in nineteen
ninety seven, I think they actually changed the recommendations so
you didn't have to do for you do there's a
certain amount of compressions to air that you would give.
And then at some point the guidelines here at least
were like, well, O could just do the compressions, that's
the important thing. Do the compressions. The airway thing isn't
as important. And a big part of it was like

(51:47):
because of concern of spreading stuff and infectious stuff. Yeah, no, no,
I didn't know that, but you're right. You have those
devices that some people will carry with them, which is
like the kinds like a mouth condom basically.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
Yeah, yeah, And he helped develop those and then like
didn't get any of the money from him or something.
That part I didn't write in the script because I
didn't pay enough attention, so don't quote me on that.
Eventually people accepted CPR because it was very effective at
saving lives. At least. Peter was just a fucking cool guy.
He was like a weird side not even a sidecaracters actually
pretty central of this story. But he didn't come out

(52:21):
of World War Two a political He was an avowed
world citizen and an anti nuclear weapons activist and an
anti war activist. He basically was like, there should be
like one federation that you know, everyone in the world
has allegiance to instead of fucking countries or whatever. He
was a tireless activist for single payer national healthcare system.
He was like, that's the only way that we are

(52:43):
going to save lives in America. When he turned seventy,
well after the rest of this story, his friends framed
a set of Peter's Laws for the Navigation of Life,
which was all the idioms he kept saying, and it
kind of just shows who he is really well, and
they're obsessively productive guy mottos including if anything can go wrong,
fix it. When given a choice, take both, start at

(53:05):
the top and work your way up. If it's worth doing,
it's got to be done now, and it's up to
us to save the world.

Speaker 3 (53:13):
It was like the first grindset influencer I know.

Speaker 2 (53:16):
And it's funny because like doctors are put I'm sure
you've never heard of this. Doctors are put under a
specific thing to like become martyrs to their job. You know,
like I've heard that, yeah, and it's kind of a problem,
and this guy absolutely embodies the worst of that.

Speaker 3 (53:31):
Yeah. This is back when people like doctors a little
oh shit, a little bit. Yeah, yeah, all right.

Speaker 2 (53:38):
But his favorite motto and if I ever open a
medical I will never open a medical services place, but
if I do, emblazoned above the door is going to
be this motto. Death is not the enemy, but occasionally
needs help with timing.

Speaker 1 (53:52):
I like that.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
Yeah that's good. A young surgeon is going to get
that tattooed on their chest now, I you know what
good it rules because I love accepting death, will also
postponing it as much as possible.

Speaker 2 (54:06):
Yeah, you know that, Like to me is like, that's
the secret of life as far as I'm concerned, is
to not be afraid of dying and like not being
a rush right right, very's in He also so he
works just to kind of finish off a bit of
his life rather than his work. We'll talk more about
his work with the ambulances later. He worked eighty hour weeks,

(54:27):
like his entire life. He still found time to play
the piano, and he and his wife Eva entered and
won waltzing contest together a year after year until eventually
they were tired to let other people win.

Speaker 3 (54:39):
Oh my gosh, that's so rad.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
I know.

Speaker 3 (54:42):
It's such a doctor mentality. We're going to be the best,
even at this faultzing thing.

Speaker 2 (54:47):
Absolutely, and I think she's into it. I think that
she's on his level about this. He found the perfect partner, Yeah, exactly.
And you know, they both tried other things. They both
were apart f two years and they're like, that's dumb.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
And they would like host like monthly salons where he
would like like all of his like kind of rich
doctor friends would come over and he would like play
piano for everyone every month at his house and stuff.
He was like he was doing bougie right as basically
as best second.

Speaker 1 (55:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:17):
Yeah, cool guy, cool stuff.

Speaker 2 (55:19):
In nineteen sixty one, he left Baltimore for the also
cool city Pittsburgh, and by nineteen sixty six he was
working on his next big, great world changing millions of
life saving thing, emergency medical services, which we'll talk about
on Wednesday.

Speaker 3 (55:38):
Oh man, that's my clo Wednesday. Yeah, you gotta wait
till Wednesday because we record these live. No, no, no,
you only have to wait like that. Can I come
back wearing the same exact clothing? Would that be okay? Yeah? Totally? Yeah, okay, good?

Speaker 2 (55:51):
All right, Well, before we leave and come back, tell
us about House of Pod or anything else. Do you
feel like plugging?

Speaker 3 (56:00):
I will plug the House of Pod first. That is
my podcast. If you like this sort of topic. I
do sometimes cover historical stuff, but largely we cover things
either that at some intersection of public health and politics
or pop culture, and sometimes we do historical stuff as
well in medicine. So if this is kind of your vibe,

(56:22):
you might enjoy it. Margaret, I'm going to have to
have you on at this point. It's not just because
you're great and because you'd be an amazing guest, but
also it's the Persian thing. If you don't now take
my invitation, then there's great offense, and then you know,
it'll be uncomfortable for Sophie, who has to deal with
both of us.

Speaker 2 (56:41):
But am I supposed to pretend to reject it and
then accept it or do I accept it right away?

Speaker 3 (56:45):
No? No, that's a very good question. Boy. You understand
the taut oaf very well. Now, if we were at
a like arguing over like who's paying the bill at
a restaurant? Right, then you have to like pretend to
fight me on that one. You have to let me
win this one. You have to say yes, yes, yes,
and then put it off as long as you want. Okay,

(57:06):
then yes, yes, yes, that sounds great. Yeah, you can
find us anywhere.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
That you get podcasts awesome. I didn't get the pun
of the podcast until I was doing the Oh, well,
there's this old there's this old book called The House
of God. It was written in like nineteen seventy seven.

Speaker 3 (57:24):
Shoot, I should now. I had the author on the
show a couple of times, and basically it was like
the first the first book in American history. It's considered
a great book, considered one of like one of the
best novels American novels of all time that really showed
medicine in a realistic light. It's a pretty problematic book
in some ways now, but there's some parts of it

(57:45):
that are Yeah, but there's some parts of it that
really hold up still. And that's just sort of where
the pun for the name House of House of Pod
came from. It's not a religious show, which sometimes I
get some very disappointed listeners checking it out for the
first time. We are not a religious show, not in
the way you'd want it to be at least. Yeah,
if that's what you're looking for, but you like it,

(58:06):
I think probably maybe, I don't know. Three do it.

Speaker 2 (58:09):
People should go listen to it, and they should also
listen to whatever Sophie wants to plug.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
I want to plug Hood Politics season three, which is
out now. We got a whole another year of Hood Politics.
Prop is really diving in deep and it's an election year,
so check that out.

Speaker 3 (58:28):
Yeah. I've been listening to Hood Politics a lot lately.
That's a good show. Whole new art we got a
whole new artwork.

Speaker 1 (58:35):
It's looking good.

Speaker 2 (58:36):
Yeah, I'm gonna plug that. I have a substack, and
if you want to know more about the things I do,
I occasionally give updates on substack, but I also just
write an essay every week and you can hear my
thoughts on things.

Speaker 3 (58:49):
By googling ardor Killjoy substack. I'm not going to tell
you the url. You're an adult and you can type it.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
In See everyone on Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (59:02):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media.
Visit our website coozonmedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.