Ambulance is a vehicle designed to transport sick or injured people. Many types of vehicles serve as ambulances. Ambulances for ground transport are specially built versions of trucks or vans. They are equipped with flashing lights and sirens for alerting drivers and pedestrians of their approach. Helicopters or airplanes serve as fast transport for the seriously ill or injured. Modern ambulances carry a variety of emergency equipment, including bandages, splints, heart monitors and defibrillators (devices to correct abnormal heart rhythms), oxygen machines, and medicines. Highly trained professionals working in ambulances can respond to a wide variety of situations involving serious illness or trauma (injury). Ambulances and the professionals that staff them are essential parts of a health care system.
Horses, mules, and camels were used in early times to transport injured people. In the late 1700’s, a French military surgeon, Dominique-Jean Larrey, created the earliest vehicles called ambulances. Larrey developed these lightweight wagons to transport wounded soldiers from battlefields. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), the United States Congress formally established an ambulance system for U.S. armies under the Ambulance Corps Act of 1864. In the late 1860’s, Commercial Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Bellevue Hospital in New York City became the first U.S. hospitals to operate ambulance services for the general public.
Until the late 1950’s and the 1960’s, ambulances mainly just transported patients to a hospital. Then ambulance design changed greatly to enable the vehicles to carry more medical equipment. The development of such emergency lifesaving measures as cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and artificial respiration changed how care was provided outside the hospital setting (see Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR)). The development of emergency health-care systems, such as the Emergency Medical Service in the United States, resulted in improvements in the design of ambulances and the capabilities of their attendants.
