Bringing EMS History to Life: The Launch of the Interactive Timeline

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how Emergency Medical Services in the United States evolved—why it looks the way it does, where the first civilian ambulance came from, or how licensing and practice standards emerged across states—this project is for you.

🔗 Explore the timeline: https://www.ems-history.com/timeline-ems-history

Over the past ten years, I’ve been doing a deep dive into the history of EMS in America. It started as background research for my first book, EMS in the United States: Fragmented Past, Future of Opportunity. But as I pulled together government reports, Civil War records, court cases, medical journal articles, and old newspaper clippings, it became clear: no one else had this kind of collection—and certainly no one had it organized, digitized, and available to the public.

So I built it.

And now it’s live: the Interactive EMS History Timeline—a curated archive of 150+ milestones that trace EMS from battlefield triage under Surgeon Jonathan Letterman to today’s cross-state licensure, AI tools, and federal policy shifts.

Each entry includes links to original source documents—primary materials that help us not just read history, but interrogate it. That includes:

• Dr. Letterman’s General Orders and personal journals

• 1860s Congressional testimony and Civil War illustrations

• The 1871 court case involving a pedestrian struck by an ambulance

• The first mention of funeral homes running ambulance services in the 1880s

• Landmark Supreme Court cases on licensure, public safety, and professionalism

You’ll also find images of the first electric ambulance in St. Louis (1894), ambulance wagons used during the Franco-Prussian War, and the first known municipal EMS deployment in Cincinnati (1865). These aren’t stories we were taught in paramedic school—but they’re essential for understanding where we came from.

This project is for:

• Clinicians, who deserve to know the story of the profession they uphold.

• Educators, who want to teach EMS history with rigor and credibility.

• Policy leaders, who make decisions every day that echo decisions made decades ago.

I’m incredibly grateful to JEMS for publishing a piece about this project:

📄 Read the article here

And to the National Registry of EMTs for sharing the project on their social channels and helping spread the word.

Understanding EMS history isn’t just about looking back. It’s about moving forward smarter.

The timeline is a resource built to inform how we educate, license, regulate, and lead EMS into its next chapter.

I hope you’ll check it out, share it, and use it.