Holocaust Education Should Start in Elementary School
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Dr. Nancy Caroline was a trailblazing Jewish woman who revolutionized emergency medical care in the US and Israel.
Nancy Caroline was born in the Boston suburb of Newton, MA on June 27, 1944. Her parents, Leo and Zelda Caroline, valued education and impressed upon their daughter and son a concern for the Jewish value of correcting social injustices and problems.
Nancy developed her interest in medicine early and worked during her teenage years at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Pathology Department as a photographer and lab worker.
She breezed through high school by graduating early and then graduated from Radcliffe (where she’d ghost write scholarly papers for the faculty) with a B.A. in linguistics. Her love for the field of medicine brought her to Case Western Reserve in Cleveland and an M.D. degree in 1971. Two years later, she moved to Pittsburgh with a fellowship in critical care medicine at Presbyterian Hospital.
Dr Caroline with a skeleton
In November, 1974, when she was 31 years old, Nancy’s life was changed when she was offered the position to become the Medical Director for Freedom House Ambulance Service, the first paramedic-staffed ambulance service in the United States.
Freedom House was founded in a poverty-stricken, black Pittsburgh neighborhood in 1967. All their emergency medical workers were Afro American. It differed radically from the existing ambulance services of the time, where either the local police or a funeral parlor would drive people to the hospital. Freedom House was revolutionary in the way it trained its staff to deliver new levels of emergency care on the way to a hospital. The terms “paramedic”, “EMT”, and “EMS” were pretty much invented by Freedom House.
When Nancy accepted the opportunity to run Freedom House, they were facing challenging times including racism, financial struggles, friction with the police, skepticism from the medical establishment, disorganization, and out-of-date training. But she understood that non-doctors could capably perform life-saving emergency skills that were traditionally performed solely by doctors.
Her mission was to reorganize Freedom House into an effective, well-trained, and financially sound unit.
She did this in a multi-tiered approach with weekly meetings that examined several of the week’s emergency calls. With a life-sized skeleton model, the EMTs were grilled on what they did. They learned from Nancy’s expert questions and from each other’s experiences.
Nancy began to ride the ambulance, going out on calls with the EMTs, to see what the crews were dealing with – gunshot wounds, stabbings, suicide attempts, heart attacks, premature births and everything in between. On one call, after a blood-soaked man was loaded into the ambulance, his enemies attacked the ambulance with hatchets and gunfire.
She put a cot in the bunkroom, moved in with the crews, and ate meals with them. She led her EMTs on tours of the hospital, breezing past the “Authorized Personnel Only” signs into corners where they practiced the intubating process – first on sedated dogs and then on hospital patients. They read charts and took vital signs in the Critical Care Unit.
Their group was becoming professionalized. In 1975, they responded to calls on five cardiac arrest patients and saved every one of them. Freedom House and Nancy Caroline were gaining national attention. Paramedic units from across the country traveled to Pittsburgh to see Freedom House, and Nancy received invitations to address medical conferences.
Pittsburgh hosted the 9th Annual Symposium on Emergency and Critical Care Medicine. One of the three-day conference’s highlights was a “mass casualty disaster” drill. Smashed cars were towed to Point State Park and Freedom House conducted a simulated rescue process from a catastrophic motor vehicle accident.
Nancy addressed the crowd and said, “This is a multi-casualty disaster. Moments ago, these 14 people were alive and well. Now they are casualties. Whether they will live or die depends on the care they receive in the next few minutes.”
The Freedom House ambulances roared in with sirens blazing. The medics ran out of the vehicles, examined and triaged the victims, opened blocked airways, applied tourniquets, traction splints, oxygen and bandages, and immobilized spinal injuries. They assessed and treated 14 victims in under 20 minutes.
The reaction from the medical professionals was overwhelming. Many doctors had never seen how patients were treated before they rolled through the doors of their respective hospitals. Freedom House was coronated as “the most skilled and sophisticated paramedics in the nation”.
Nancy’s next achievement was standardizing Freedom House’s procedures and protocols into a training textbook for EMS workers. Emergency Care in the Streets was written in 1979 and is in its ninth printing. It’s considered to be the EMS Bible and the leading authority on emergency medical care. Over the course of her lifetime, she would write or co-write ten more books on trauma care.
In 1976 Nancy decided to move to Israel. Even though she had little prior connection to Israel, after learning of Israel’s acute need to train paramedics she accepted the job of EMS Director for Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross. She became its first medical director and founded Magen David Adom’s paramedic training program. Recreating her Pittsburgh work, she trained the first generation of Israeli paramedics to respond to terrorist attacks.
MDA’s first class of paramedics with Dr. Caroline, back row, fourth from left.
On March 11, 1978, she was riding in an ambulance on the coastal highway, responding to a PLO attack on a bus. Her ambulance was attacked by PLO gunfire, and she was horrified to witness the crowded passenger bus destroyed in flames. Nancy frequently rode to the Israel-Lebanon border to assist in aid stations near the town of Metula in Northern Israel.
During Nancy’s years in Israel, her co-workers gave her an apt and very fitting nickname. She was dubbed the “Mother Theresa of Israel”. Both women dedicated their lives to serving the poor and showing love, care and concern to their sick and injured neighbors wherever they lived.
She took her mission of public health service to Nairobi in 1982 as a “flying doctor” for the African Medical and Research Foundation. For five years she treated patients and trained healthcare workers in disaster medicine across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Sudan. She even wrote an “Ask the Doctor” column for a Kenyan newspaper.
In 1987, Nancy returned to Israel where her house in Metula was hit by rocket fire three times. She continued her work in patient care and medical treatment. She founded the Hospice of the Upper Galilee in 1995.
The “Mother Theresa of Israel” contracted cancer of the plasma cells and passed away on December 12, 2002, at the age of 58. She spent her final days in the hospice she helped create.
It’s no exaggeration to say that thousands of lives were saved by Freedom House and Nancy Caroline’s vision to improve public health and revolutionize emergency medicine.
“She was a pioneer who went to bat for paramedics when paramedic wasn’t a household word,” said A.J. Heightman, editor of the Journal of Emergency Medical Services. “She believed that pre-hospital care could be rendered efficiently by lay people, like firefighters and others who took on the task. She managed to explain extremely complicated medical concepts in words and images that people can understand.”
SOURCES
A truly amazing lady, who was taken well before her time.
What a beautiful tribute to an amazing woman. Thank you for sharing.
Fantastic read. What an incredible human being. I really like reading good uplifting true stories.