Paramedic: Nancy Caroline's Emergency Care in the Streets

Nancy Lee Caroline was born in a Boston suburb to Leo and Zelda Caroline in 1944. Nancy had a strong social conscience and devoted her life to medicine, teaching, and her patients-and she had a superb sense of humor. She has often been rightly called the Mother of Paramedics because of her dedication to paramedic education. She died of multiple myeloma at age 58 in 2002.Nancy’s medical career began at the young age of 15 in the pathology laboratory of the famous Benjamin Castleman, MD, at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she conducted medical research long before she entered college. Nancy majored in linguistics at Radcliffe College, and received her MD from Case Western Reserve University in 1977. Thereafter she took a fellowship in Critical Care Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. It was here that she began her groundbreaking work in paramedicine. Around that time, the late Peter Safar, MD, was overseeing a US Department of Transportation grant to create a curriculum for paramedics. Dr. Safar offered Nancy an opportunity, as medical director of Freedom House Enterprises Ambulance Service, to train paramedics chosen from a group of African-American men who did not have a chance to complete their high school educations. Nancy was extremely successful-so successful that she was asked to write a curriculum for paramedic training, a curriculum that was published as the first edition of Emergency Care in the Streets.The list of Nancy’s other accomplishments is long. She served as the first medical director of Israel’s Red Cross society, Senior Medical Officer of the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF), consultant for the League of Red Cross Societies, director of medical programs for the American Joint Distribution Committee in Addis Ababa, medical consultant for the Center for Educational Technology, and adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school. She also performed significant volunteer work focused on humanitarian efforts, such as providing better nourishment and health care to orphans and founding a hospice program in Upper Galilee.Nancy left the world too soon, but unquestionably left the world a better place.With more than 38,000 members, the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (aaos.org or orthoinfo.org), is the premier not-for-profit organization that provides education programs for orthopaedic surgeons and allied health professionals, champions the interests of patients and advances the highest quality of musculoskeletal health. Orthopaedic surgeons and the Academy are the authoritative sources of information for patients and the general public on musculoskeletal conditions, treatments and related issues.More than one in four Americans have bone or joint health problems, making them the greatest cause of lost work days in the U.S. When orthopaedic surgeons restore mobility and reduce pain, they help people get back to work and to independent, productive lives. Orthopaedic surgeons keep this “Nation in Motion.” To learn more about A Nation in Motion campaign, or to read hundreds of patient stories or to submit your own story, visit ANationInMotion.org.