July 21, 2025 • 56 mins
Margaret talks to Kaveh Hoda about the decentralized medical infrastructure that keeps protesters safe.
Sources:
non-public training documents provided by a street medic friend
https://www.bu.edu/bostonia/fall10/street-medic/street-medic.pdf
http://web.archive.org/web/20250220125506/https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5024403/
http://web.archive.org/web/20241028174039/https://massleague.org/CHC/History.php
https://web.archive.org/web/20250212163349/https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/medical-committee-human-rights/2014-09
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/health/h-jack-geiger-dead.html
https://medium.com/@Hesperian/care-for-where-there-is-no-justice-the-modern-history-of-street-medics-and-how-they-support-social-a02e940523d4
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/416-spring-2025/the-praxis-of-street-medics/
https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/kupdf.net_street-medic-handbook.pdf
https://tabpres.org/the-flying-black-medics/
https://web.archive.org/web/20071220215141/http://bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multipage/documents/02704493.htm
https://archive.org/stream/street-medic-guide-paper-revolution-collective-
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool media. Everyone's recording.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Yep, that's right.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
I'm just swallowed water.
Speaker 3 (00:08):
Wrong.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I cannot do the Heimlich from a distance. Oh no,
do you know the guy Heimlich himself? He actually interesting.
He never he's not dead yet. Well as of like
five years ago, he was still alive, so I don't know,
I should check on that. It might be dead. But
he actually never performed the Heimlich maneuver on anyone himself.
And as he got older, he started to get a
(00:31):
little kookier. Well, his thing works, the Heimlich short, but
then he started to like promote it for other things
like drowning victims, so like water going in the lungs.
He was like, you can get it out with the Heimlich,
and other doctors like no, that's crazy, including his son,
who was also a doctor, and so there was this
great drama between the two of them.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Anyways, Hello, and welcome to Cool People, Hit Did Cool Stuff.
You're a weekly podcast where we learn all about the
Heimlich maneuver. That's actually not the topic of today, but
that is the guest of today, doctor Heimlich, but instead
doctor Cavajoda. Hi who used voice? You just heard Hi, Harriet, I'm.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
No doctor Heimlich. But I do like to squeeze people.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Consensually cool, and you are also, in addition to a
doctor and a consensual people squeezer, a podcast host yourself.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
I have a podcast called The House of Pod. It
is a relatively fun medical podcast. We look at science,
medical topics and we make fun of grifters, and I
think it sort of falls into the same sort of
world that people who listen to your show would enjoy
and wanted to take part in. It's called the House
of Pod.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I tend to agree, and if people want to start,
you can hear me on an episode talking about being
a street kid and street kid medicine, where I'm not
at all the expert and I just like learn a
bunch of stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Same with me. That's what I do. I do the
show just so I can learn stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
That's pretty good. I kind of messed this one up.
Other podcasts I've done. You find the person who knows
the thing and then you ask them about it. And
instead I was like, I'm going to commit to becoming
the expert on a new topic every week.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah. I realized that to be a medical podcast or
someone in this medical wellness health podcast realm. If you
want to be famous. If I really want to be
good at this gig. If I wanted to make it,
I would have that Andrew Huberman thing where I pretend
I'm an expert in every single field and I come
(02:31):
at every topic as if I know exactly what the
answer is, as if there is a real answer, And
that's just not the way it is. Unfortunately, you have
to most medical things if you want to cover them right,
you do need to have an actual expert in that field,
someone who has trained specifically for that. So that's why
my show is going to remain tiny forever. But it's
(02:52):
the way I think it needs to be done.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yeah, have it be accurate, and yes, not go to
the one doctor who claims to know every single thing
in the world.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, you will not learn body hacks on my show
or health hacks on my show.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
That it was funny because you say that there's all
these different types of medicine that are necessary, but actually
tea tree oil fixes everything.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Let's talk about oils. Let's get into oil.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Actually snake oil in particular, I've heard is good for everything.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Well, you know what's funny is actually our mutual friend
Robert Evans once tried to convince me that it initially
did start off as a very useful thing. Oh snake oil, Yeah,
actual snake oil. Interesting, Okay, I'd never really delved into
the history of it. Now. Of course, the conversation around oils,
whether they be essential or seed, that conversation is like
(03:44):
been taken over by the wellness grifter community. So yeah,
when we do talk about oils, it raises the hackles.
The hair is on the back of my neck stand
up because oh yeah, I'm ready to go when the
oils come up.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
And like hippie punk world, people try to use teachree
oil to solve everything. Yeah, and it's particularly interesting to me.
I was pitching this once. I was like, well, I
have this problem. I have the skin thing. And I
was talking to one of my friends as a PA
and he was like, you know, look, and he specialized
for a long time in skin like stuff that on
(04:18):
house people had to deal with, right, And he was like, look, yeah,
you could put teach reale on that. You could also
like just I don't know, bomb a neighborhood to get
rid of the rodents. That's fine, you can do whatever
you want.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Yeah, it's an approach.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yeah, one approach is to start talking about things that
are completely unrelated today's topic, instead of introducing our producer,
Sophie Hi Sophie Hey, and also pointing out that this
podcast is audio engineered by Eva hi Eva.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
Hi Eva.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
You have to say hi to oh Hi hi Eva.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
I'm so sorry. Please don't make please will make my
sound terrible because of that, I didn't know I was
supposed to say, hi, You're the best.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Did you watch the show the Pit I did.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
I did a whole episode. I yes. Is the long
and short of it. It's very good. It is probably
the most accurate medical show on TV in a way,
which isn't saying much. The bar is relatively low, but
I mean, obviously a lot of the things that they
cover are real that could really happen. Those things all
(05:22):
happening in one day is pretty absurd, and even the
busiest er it doesn't work like that. And I have
lots of little nitpicks sure about the show, like little things,
but they're not a big deal. There was one thing though,
that I noticed that no one else is brought up
in that show, and I'm wondering, maybe if one of
your listeners knows or for one of you had actually
(05:42):
paid attention to this. But there is this sexual tension
between no Wiley's character and one of the older residents
in the show because they had dated before. But if
that is the case, then he dated her while she
was an intern or a resident or even a medical student.
And I don't know how that has not been discussed
because that's a little bit weird and problematic. But like,
(06:04):
that's something about the show that was kind of Anyways,
I don't want to get too distracted.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
I brought up the show because they have a character
that comes in. The character in the show was like
an original member of Freedom House.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Which would yes, yeah, if you want to bring it.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
It wasn't just a like let me ask my dear
friend a thing. It was like a let's bring it back.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, very well done. The episode I did previously hear
was about the freedom That's where I learned about And
then after being on your show, Margaret, I invited Chief
John Moon, one of the original Freedom House ambulance drivers,
to come on to my podcast and I got to
meet him and that was an amazing experience and I
learned so much. But I learned that from your show
(06:49):
that was really that's where I got the idea.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
And if anyone's curious, what the hell we're talking about.
Freedom House was the first EMTs and their history is
far more in interesting than I would have assumed, and
far more recent than I would have assumed. Yeah, well
we're going to talk about this week. You'll be shocked
to know that came up with a medical topic for you.
Just completely shocked. I know that you weren't expecting that
(07:13):
at all.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I mean, although I would love to talk about like
other random stuff like basketball and music, which I love,
medicine is the thing. I know. I did spend a
lot of time doing it, so I know it.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Sophie's head popped up at the mention of basketball.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah, Damian Lillard just re signed with the Blazers. I'm
just saying, one.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Day I'm doing a basketball episode just for Sophie.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
I want to be on that one.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Oh okay, that's good to know. Anyway, you ever heard
of street medics?
Speaker 2 (07:42):
I have, I have.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
I know you also did an episode about this recently.
When I talking to one of my friends.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
That's exactly what I was gonna say was a lot
of what I know about street medicine is either from
you know, interacting with a couple online on Twitter or
Blue Sky and through you who I I've met now
one or two and done some podcasting with those people,
so I know a little bit and mostly from what
you've shared with me.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah. This week, so I've been doing this series where
I've been talking about the ultra globalization movement of the
late nineties and the early aughts, and I've been talking
about all of these different pieces that came together to
build sort of modern protest culture that has then had
a heavy amount of influence on the teens and twenties
protest culture. And We've talked about the Zapatistas and Chiapas
(08:32):
who set up a lot of hospitals, and I'm just
throwing in all the medical things and then sort of
laid a lot of the groundwork for confronting neoliberalism and
all of these things. And then we talked about the
Battle of Seattle, the protests in nineteen ninety nine. Last
week we talked about the National Lawyers Guild who go
out and do legal observation. And this week we are
(08:53):
going to talk about the early formation of street medics,
and I'm going to weirdly do the same go back
to the nineteenth century that I did last week when
I talked about the nalg because I wanted to talk
about a rad lawyer who represented some labor activists in Chicago,
And this week I'm going to just why not start
(09:16):
in a really similar place, because one of the origins
of the modern street metic movement is people in the
US South working to register black voters and facing an
awful lot of police violence and non state violence for
doing so. The very first episode of this show was
about the Haymarket Anarchists, or a group of labor organizers
(09:38):
in Chicago who were framed up and hanged for some
strikes in eighteen eighty six. See the first episode of
the show last week's episode of the show, and bring
this up as many times as I can. Two of
the main characters in that are Lucy Parsons, who was
born enslaved, and her husband, although they couldn't be legally
married because of miscegenation laws, Albert Parsons. Albert, for his part,
(09:58):
survived being shot by white bigots for trying to register
black voters in the South. He survived that he didn't
survive getting hanged by the state literally for the crime
of being an anarchist, but that's a different story. So
the fact that someone got shot trying to register black
voters in the late eighteen sixties, right, and then you
can just fast forward ninety years and watch people get
(10:20):
shot for trying to register black voters in the South.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, yeah, which is also not that long ago.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, totally. During the early civil rights era, the very
beginning of the nineteen sixties, you had activists from the
North who poured into the South to coordinate with Southern
activists to help register people to vote. And we've talked
about that era a fair amount on this show, including
episodes where we talked about the armed, nonviolent civil rights movement,
about how the things we understand about the civil rights
(10:48):
movement and the relationship with political violence, or rather their
actual relationship is far more nuanced than what we assume
them to be, because an awful lot of violence was
enacted onto people for trying to desegregate the country, to
say nothing of the violence enacted onto people who ended
chattel slavery, the bloodiest war in the United States history.
(11:08):
Wherever there is violence, there are people trying to repair
the wounds caused by that violence, and of course, poverty
and racism are also forms of violence, and so we'll
get to this a little later, but you get these
essentially activists, although they don't even necessarily need to feel
like activist doctors who are like, well, actually, poverty is
(11:31):
the thing causing the damage to my patient that needs
to be addressed.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
It's funny because people these days will say that medicine
shouldn't be political, and in a way that is absolutely true.
But historically and currently, there is no way, unfortunately to
separate medicine and politics. And it's interesting to hear this
historical perspective, obviously because it's always been that way here.
But it's hard to be paying attention to public health
(11:59):
issues not consider massive political ramifications.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, God, especially right now, I feel like this even
kind of accidentally ties into the thing I'm planning to
do kind of once they finish all of these pieces
that come together around protest is I want to start
doing the work that was done delay the groundwork for
the things that we take for granted that are currently
being taken away from us, like public health initiatives. You know, yeah, absolutely,
so people are going down white and black are going
(12:27):
down to help register black voters and they're getting hurt
in the process. So in nineteen sixty three, a bunch
of medical professionals formed an affinity group that they called
the Medical Committee for Civil Rights or MCCR, and this
particular group of people they went to the March on
Washington and then they decided to volunteer at that they
(12:49):
had affinity group. They go to the March on Washington
and they're like, well, next year's big thing is Freedom Summer,
another one of these registration drives. Right, they changed their
name to the Medical Committee for Human Rights. And this
group is the mother of the Street medic movement and
also the mother of a ton of other stuff besides this,
(13:09):
which is another thing that I come up all the time.
There's all of these like really discrete groups that we
think about and then we look back and we're like, oh,
like eight people invented like all of those things in
the nineteen forties or whatever. Yeah, So, in the spring
of nineteen sixty four, when around one thousand volunteers came
to Mississippi to register voters Freedom Summer, around one hundred
(13:30):
of them were medical professionals, especially doctors and nurses working
with MCCHR. Their arrival was coordinated by doctor Robert Smith,
one of the first black physicians in Mississippi. And I
think that's important to highlight. One because Robert Smith is
the name of the guy from the Cure, and I
think it's funny. And two because we often present white
(13:50):
heroes coming from the North, or we even kind of
present like white wannabe saviors coming from the North and
not address the fact that this was coordinated in solidarity
with people working on the ground. Who are you know,
one of the black doctors in Mississippi.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
That's something that's really nice about what we did. When
you talk to me about the Freedom House people is
they're going to make a movie out of it. I
know that's coming down the pipeline. Yeah, I'm about ninety
certain it's going to probably start someone like Timothy Shallow
May as like the one token white guy in the
Freedom House. Yeah, the story about everyone else, all the
(14:30):
African American guys, who were the people doing all the work.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
Yes, Macbie knows who Chalo May is.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Nope, nope, Okay, I.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Assume he was a white man. Hold on, I bet
if I look him up. See. The problem is that
I'm a little bit face blind and a lot of
it name blind, Shalla May okay, Timothy Shallo. Ma, let's
see Dune I assume Oh yeah, yeah, yeah this guy. No, totally, Yeah,
it's the Dune man. I understand, Dune guy. Yeah, I understand.
(15:00):
And modern society that I live in, I don't live
entirely in books set in the nineteen or eighteen sixties. Yeah, totally,
so exactly that. And there are ways that you can
tell these stories to focus on like some of the
white people and the way a lot of these stories
are told does that. And I'm going to try and
(15:22):
undo that where I can, and I'm not going to
totally succeed, but I will say there was a white
person heavily involved in this as the villain. The head
of the Mississippi Department of Health was a bigot and
segregationist named Archie Gray, which is a good name for
a shitty racist.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
It's a bad guy named Yeah. It's sort of the
opposite of Robert Smith, which is always someone cool. If
your name is Archie, I'm sorry for your three listeners
named Archie.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
You're finding it up Hill Battle, Yeah, yeah, you're finding
about Bill Battle. And then Gray is just a villain's
last name, and that's fine. You can lean into it
and be a good person who's kind of a villain,
or you can just be Archie Gray and be a
biggot and segregationist. The Mississippi Department of healthhit ahead of
it and he was like, yeah, I won't be giving
you all licenses to practice in Mississippi. So all of
(16:09):
these out of town doctors come and they're like, hey,
we're going to practice, and he's like, no, you're not.
I don't like you. They couldn't practice medicine formally, despite
all of them being professionals in the field, and so
they started doing what they could. Some of them formed
the Medical Presence Project to specifically provide medical care at protests,
(16:31):
making them the first street medic collective I've found in
anything I've ever read. And when I've talked to street
medics about their history, they're going to point to the MPP,
the Medical Presence Project, as the first one.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Very cool.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
But the second thing that those people will tell me
is they'll say, Margaret, but what about those goods and services?
You'll be shocked how much this comes up in my
regular life. I'll just be talking to people, and people
be like, but Margaret, I always go to you to
find out about goods and services, and so I know
you've been telling me history like a normal person at
a party does, But why don't you tell us about stuff?
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Yeah, Well, like, if people are hanging out with you
face to face, they still want the podcast experience, so
you have to give it to them. That's right.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
I totally never make accidental adtivots in the middle of conversation.
That would be weird. It's like a bathroom break, that's
a yeah, totally. Anyway, here's some ads and we're back.
So the Medical Presence Project and just the people who
(17:32):
went down there, one hundred or so people who went
down there, they started helping out the rest of the
thousand or so volunteers, and they also started serving some
of basically the longtime activists were burned out like hell,
and so they were suffering from what at the time
was being called battle fatigue. And I love that there
are just like like PTSD is just named a different thing.
(17:53):
At any given decade, it seems like I'm wondering what's next,
because clearly people were like, can you believe they used
to call it? Like when it was. I don't know
what came before shell shock, but like whenever game before
shell shock, they were like, man, you can believe they
used to call it that instead of shell shock. We
now understand this.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Yeah, what was the harsher version of shell shock? That
is funny? Yeah, sure there was something terrible.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
And then eventually people are gonna be like PTSD, what
an antiquated, old timy way of putting it.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
I think they're going to go back to something like
the phrases my kids uses, like Italian brain rot. I
don't know what it means, but it's like these phrases
that are like Italian uh yeah, it's like a gen
Z term for like being online too much. I think, Okay,
I don't want to go into because I don't know
enough about it to mention it. And hopefully there's nothing
really problematic.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
The podcast where we pretend to understand slang of the youth,
that'd be really popular. Everyone love it.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Yeah, yeah, your own children get you canceled.
Speaker 4 (18:46):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
That's you know, it's the ones you love, they're the
ones that hurts you the most.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
I'm glad it was you, son.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Oh funny.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
One volunteer doctor Lee Hoffman described his activities that summer
like this, I think this is a given day. Quote.
Attended a civil rights worker who was beaten over the head,
played football with local high school boys. Visited several sick
local people with nurse, was arrested for being out after curfew,
put a lock on a freedom house. Attended funeral at
(19:21):
request of a terminal patient I had seen earlier. And
so they're just going down there and trying to be helpful,
trying to be useful. The nineteen sixty six Orientation Manual
to the MCCHR described the medical presence project the street
medic part of it this way. Quote. Just the presence
(19:44):
of health personnel has been found extraordinarily useful in allaying
apprehensions about disease and injury in the civil rights workers.
There also seems to be a preventative aspect to medical presence.
Actual violence seems to occur less often if it is
known that medical professionals are present, particularly when civil rights
workers are visited in jail, at the time of imprisonment
(20:07):
or thereafter regularly. In addition, medical personnel should anticipate violence
in terms of specific projects and localities and be present
at the right place at the right time. Thus, medical
personnel should be an intimate contact with civil rights organizations
at all times and be aware of any immediately planned activities.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
I feel like this is.
Speaker 5 (20:28):
All an elaborate plan that you've concocted, Margaret to guilt
me into doing more work at protests than I do.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
That's the thing though, right is like you're like, we
also just still go into your day job and help
people with very dramatic problems.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
You know, I have so much respect for the people
doing this. You know, doctors are generally a risk averse group.
That's a big part of like why that's true. We
went into this job and the first place, and you know,
we think of the safest thing in every possible situation.
That's part of what makes us good. We don't think
outside the box in some ways, you know, we're very
(21:08):
linear thinkers. So for people that have the training that
they could have focused their time and energy on going
out and building a practice and making money or doing
whatever they were going to do, to do this instead.
I mean, obviously I'm a fan because it's my profession,
but I'm so impressed with these people doing this. It
(21:29):
seems to me it's such a zig when people would
expect them to zag, and I appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
No, that's actually a really interesting point about Like I'm
like thinking through of like my doctor friends, and I'm like, oh, yeah, no,
Like that's the person I go to to not tell
me to do the crazy thing, but instead to very
specifically tell me to not do the crazy thing.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah. Yeah, we're the boring friends generally.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Which are absolutely necessary.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
You're not my boring friend, you know, I'm fun for
a doctor, but the bar is low.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
So one of the other things that they learned was
that like of the people down there, they tended to
be a little bit older, right, and so they also
tended to be a kind of counterbalancing force almost generationally,
and like, not that older people are necessarily wiser. In fact,
the older people are usually more risk averse, right, because
(22:19):
they've seen what happens to all their friends when people
aren't risk averse. But of like a thousand people going down,
a greater percentage of the older folks who went down,
which I have a feeling means they were like thirty,
But like, right, I don't actually know, because the problem
is that when I read things about like people who
are live in the sixties. A lot of them are
still alive today and they're very old, and so I'm like, ah, yes,
(22:39):
and so they sort of in my head are.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Still old back then, you know, right, they were always sixty.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
I mean when you see pictures of them. The funny
thing is, you know, we always look at pictures. I
don't know, there's probably a name for the phenomenon, but like,
whenever you look at pictures of people our age back then,
they look so much older. Like when they showed like
the cast of the TV show Cheers, which you probably
never watched, they have like this meme where that shows
you all their pictures and then their ages above it.
(23:06):
And the characters that you assumed were always sixty when
the show started were all like twenty nine, thirty three.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Yeah, totally totally. And it's just like these styles have changed,
and like, yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
Like the Golden Girls, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
You brought that up. You were telling me that, like
they were all not incredibly old.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, Blant was like forty something. Yeah, fuck, we're just
super young. Final by the way, just laying everyone, No, yeah,
the forties are the new teens.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Great, That's why I'm getting into skateboarding. Anyway. Uh No,
So after Freedom Summer, they get back and they're like,
you know what, We're going to keep MCCHR around. And
they hired paid staff, and they opened chapters in a
bunch of different cities, and they helped out civil rights workers.
They helped out people in their cities who had no
access to medical care. They picketed the American Medical Association
(23:57):
because it lets state local affiliates deny black doctors memberships
until the late sixties. And yeah, sorry, we'll probably gonna
talk more about them. I don't know that much about them,
But whenever I do these episodes, whenever there's like the
big institutional things still around, you look back and like
in the nineteen tens, they were just monsters.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Right, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, You're like, I wonder if they still are.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
I don't know. They've always been conservative, They've leaned conservative,
at least historically.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Okay. In nineteen sixty six, Martin Luther King Junior spoke
at their convention at the MCCHR convention and said, quote,
of all the forms of inequality injustice and healthcare is
the most shocking and inhumane, and street medics have been
at the forefront of developing protocols for dealing with chemical weapons.
(24:47):
They're doing all of this stuff right, because the world
doesn't get boring in nineteen sixty six. There's a lot
going on seed pretty much the entire first year of
this show. Street Medics are the forefront of developing protocols
for dealing with chemical weapons for reasonably obvious reasons. And
I'm not going to get into the specifics of the
different protocols they developed on air, because the first practice
(25:08):
they developed, which was later adapted by the US military,
can actually make the condition worse when done improperly, and
because of that complication, by the end of the twentieth century,
Street Medics developed yet another protocol, one that is safer.
These days, every street medic I know spends their free
time proselytizing the virtues of just using water for eye
(25:30):
flushes for chemical weapons. Yes, not milk, not milk. I'm
going to end up custom writing an ad that's just
not milk. That's the ad, not milk.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah, the milk thing is funny because it's so persistent,
and every time there's a new round of protests that
comes up, you see like Instagram or TikTok, people talking
about using milk, because on some level it seems like
it would make sense if there's something your eye you
feel like it's acidic, and maybe the milk.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
It will cultualize it.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Yeah, but it is not the case. Just water, water, water, water,
h lots of water, more water than you think.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Yeah, and there are specific conditions in hospital situations or
whatever where there's other protocols that people use. But like
in the field, imagine going to jail covered in milk.
Just imagine that and then think, wouldn't I rather be
covered in water? Right now?
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Jesus Christ, milk was a bad choice.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
I never did that math, but wow, yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
That was what like, because I knew it was like
not true for a very long time. Sure, but it
was when a street medic friend of mine was just like, yeah, now,
imagine that you're going to spend like the next forty
eight hours in lockup with no access to shower and
you're just covered in milk. That's getting worse.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
For a little while, mcchr toyed with the idea of
considering itself politically neutral, but as the nineteen sixties went on,
a majority of them agreed we're not bystanders, we are
aligned directly with the movements that they cared for. And
what's interesting last week we talked about the National Lawyer's
Guild and it's a very very similar origin. It's a
(27:09):
couple decades earlier, but by the nineteen sixties, the National
Lawyer's Guild was also like, look, we are part of
these movements, we care about these movements. We're not going
to pretend like we're neutral. That doesn't going to stop
us from doing our jobs, which involves a certain amount of,
you know, taking a little bit of a step back
from certain things.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Right, I'm sorry, just for my clarification. So the MCCHR,
that's the Medical Committee for Human Rights. Yeah, and that
sort of came from that Medical Committee for Civil Rights.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
And just roughly speaking, is there a sense of how
big it was? I'm assuming and my brain's having a
hard time imagining like whether or not this is a
room of like ten people or hundreds, or was there
any sense of like how large this organization was.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
I don't have numbers in this script. And then I've
read a lot of different sources about this early stuff,
and I know there's chapters in a bunch of different cities.
I am guessing in the like high hundreds, that's my guess.
I know they started off with about one hundred. They
started off going down there with about one hundred people.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Oh see, that's rad. That's actually so much bigger than
my mind had envisioned. And I also didn't know that
it was in multiple places. That's really Yeah, that's actually
pretty I guess I'm surprised I haven't heard about them,
but I guess I shouldn't be.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
No, it interesting because like they're sort of seen as
a little bit the precursor and a little bit like
a little bit more politically neutral than the like street
medic thing that's going to break out from it. You know,
a lot of different things are going to come out
of it, and actually the whole we'll get to something cool.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Okay, okay.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
So one of the major figures who provides a through
line across this history of street medics is named Anne Hirshman,
and she wrote in a newsletter at that time that
MCCHR members must quote take our stand first as part
diticipants in the struggles that will be taking place against
war and oppression, and then use our skills and share
our skills if they are needed they also the thing
(29:08):
that I just said, I was going to say, really soon,
the community health center movement comes from this oh shit, yeah,
and that is very widespread across the countries.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Most of what I've read of the histories of the
community health center movement credits to Maverick doctor guys like
two white dudes and a bunch of federal funding from
the government for creating the first community health centers. And
you've got to find histories that focus on the civil
rights movement specifically and the MCCHR to find the connection
(29:42):
and find out that they were MCCHR members. I also,
at the risk of becoming the Mally Konger of my
own show. From the show Weird Little Guys, which everyone
should be listening to, I can draw a connection between
the community health center movement and and people fighting against
apartheid in South Africa. Okay, now, if it was a
(30:04):
Weird Little Guy's episode, it would be people fighting four
apartheid in South Africa. There was a doctor named Jack
Geeger who was part of MCCHR. Like so many people
that we've talked about on the show. He was raised
in New York City by Jewish parents who'd fled the
Holocaust that he ended up spending some of his teenage
years being raised by a black actor. I don't know
(30:25):
how much that's myth making. I mean, it's true he
ran away from home and grew up in a black
household for a while, But I don't know how much
of that's like myth making. Because he's a very big
civil rights guy.
Speaker 5 (30:35):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
He had studied in South Africa in the nineteen fifties
under two doctors who developed what they called community oriented
primary care, and they'd run two clinics in South Africa.
One was in a housing project in a city and
one was at a rural was called a tribal reserve.
These clinics were free clinics, but they also helped develop
(30:57):
nutritional programs and shit like that. So in nineteen sixty four,
ten years later, he's in the US and Jack Geeger
is like, we should do this in the US, and
we should do it in the Deep South. He talked
a rich person into funding a free clinic in Millston, Mississippi,
and it ruled and it worked really well. Like I
(31:20):
haven't found anyone saying anything negative about it, and everything
I've looked for it turns out that giving people free
medical care makes everything better, like.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Makes a community better.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
Yeah, who would have thought.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Yeah, but you need like one rich person per clinic
for that model, right right, And they needed a fuck
ton of clinics. So he teamed up with a doctor
named Count Gibson, who his first name is Count, which
is a cool first.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
His name was Count. Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Yeah yeah, and he's actually his dad's name is Count,
so he's actually Count Gibson as a junior.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
So cool.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
And Count Gibson was the chair of the Department of
Medicine at Tufts University. I feel like if I was
in at the university and the head of the medical
department was Count Gibson, I'd like watch my neck while
I was sleeping.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Just yeah, this is free Sesame Street. But yeah yeah,
but actually, when you're talking about the federal funding they got,
this is okay. And I apologize in advance. This is
going to be embarrassing my lack of knowledge of US history.
This is Lyndon Johnson. Right, we're going to get to that. Okay,
We're going to get to Lyndon Johnson's war on poverties.
That's going to be the solution they find, but right
now they're like trying to figure out. They're like, well,
(32:29):
we can't find a rich guy.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
For every clinic. We need federal funds, right, and so
count Gibson. He was another cool doctor guy. He was
heavily inspired by the Catholic anarchist Dorothy Day from the
Catholic Worker Movement, and he was basically like the first
white guy to scream what the fuck about the Tuskegee
Syphilists study in which black men were given syphilis by
the US government because the US government is racist as fuck.
Speaker 5 (32:51):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
So it like people started listening more because the white man,
the well respected doctor, was like, y'all are doing what right?
Why would that be an appropriate thing to do? I
don't understand, highly problematic. Yeah, and again not that long ago.
I know, not that long ago. And so these two
folks team up and they're like, all right, we need
(33:12):
funding for a ton of these clinics. And President Lyndon Johnson,
which is if you had asked me three weeks ago
before I wrote the script, hey, when was Lyndon Johnson President? Again,
I would have been like and giving me a multiple
choice and been like, eighteen twenty two or like nineteen
sixty seven. I would have been like, man, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
It's like I was before I had kids, where every
kid seemed like they were twelve, whether or not they
were like two or nineteen.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Totally totally. You've been twelve for five years now, right, Yeah, yeah, totally,
like I'm old enough to drink.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Oh fuck.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
So President Lindon Johnson was president, and he was doing
his War on Poverty thing, and there was some funding around.
So the pair got the Office of Economic Opportunity to
fund two community health centers. One was started in a
housing project in Boston in December nineteen sixty five, while
the next one was opened in Mount Bayou in the
(34:11):
heart of Mississippi in nineteen sixty six. Some people are
being left out of the story. We've got our two
white men, but in the photo showing the building of
the Mount Bayou Clinic, you've got Jack Gieger kneeling next
to a black doctor named doctor John Hatch. But that
doesn't make me mad at Jack Geeger. He's not the
one who wrote these histories. It's just I'm just annoyed.
I need to know more about the people of color
(34:33):
who are involved in the creation of these The goal
of these clinics wasn't to just sit around waiting for
people to get sick and being like, hey, you can
come here for free, which, to be clear, would rule
and be better. But they wanted to practice what Giger
called social medicine. The social order and not medical services
is what determines health. Is the concept of social medicine,
(34:55):
and it is a viewpoint shared by the Black Panthers
and many other people coming shortly after era. And this
is like my favorite part of all of this. Mound Bayou.
At the clinic, doctors would write prescriptions for food, and
the governor of Mississippi complained about this practice, like, ah,
(35:18):
you're making this political.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
You know, feeding people.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Yeah, and Jack Eager said, quote, the last time I
looked in my medical textbooks, they said the specific therapy
for malnutrition was food.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
That's pretty it's pretty good. It's pretty sharp. My question,
I suppose, though, is you know, when I write prescriptions
there for a pharmacy r. Why were they writing these
prescriptions for, like to take to the grocery store.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
I yeah, I wonder what the means by which the
fulfillment of the food is coming through?
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Yeah, maybe a symbolic.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
It might be symbolic. They also might have had.
Speaker 4 (35:53):
Like a usually have a pantry of some kind.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
I've gone to a lot of clinics that are specifically
for underserved people as a transperson and someone who didn't
have a lot of money for a long time, and
especially when I lived in a vehicle, and a lot
of those clinics would have their pharmacies in house, and
so the same place that you get your prescription, you
then walk around the corner to the pharmacy and they're like, okay,
(36:18):
five dollars please or whatever. Like, you know, it's there's
a lot of a lot of I have been very lucky,
mostly because the community health movement. I've been very lucky
a various points in my life that a prescription from
a certain type of doctor means free whatever the thing is,
you know. And these clinics worked, and the movement grew,
and now there are more than a thousand of these
(36:38):
community health centers around the country serving twenty eight million
people as of twenty twenty. I didn't find specifically about
their funding being a lot of trouble right now, but
I suspect their funding is in trouble right now. But Meanwhile,
MCCHR keeps going just like the well, not really necessarily
(37:01):
the products themselves, I don't know how long they last,
but the concept of interrupting entertainment to advertise things that
will go on forever, forever beautiful, and we're back. So
MCR keeps on going. It doesn't get subsumed by the
Community Health Center movement that kind of splits off separately,
(37:24):
and the Street Medic Collective, the Medical Presence Project help
treat people. What gets called Bloody Sunday, probably the like
fifth or sixth thing I've covered on this show is
called Bloody Sunday when Martin Luther King's march from Selma
to Montgomery was attacked by police who hospitalized more than
one hundred people. And it's funny because like I did
(37:47):
grow up like in the American you know, public school system.
I did learn during the Civil Rights movement that the
cops attacked a lot of people with like hoses and
dogs and stuff like that. It's still just like hard
to conceptualize from that being like, oh, yeah, and then
there's a big peaceful march and a hundred people were hospitalized.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yeah, this is the one on the bridge, right, the
Edmund I Caridge, that famous picture with the civil rights
leader in Selma, Alabama. Right, this is that I feel
like they made a movie about this that I'd never
watched but probably should have.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
I think that. I mean, you know, I'm double checking. Yeah,
I had to double check just now, but yes, a
lot of the famous pictures around this include a bridge.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
I remember because of John Lewis. Sorry, total digression of
my back.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
I mean, it's that's the violence that you know, people
had to go and try and care for. Tom Hayden,
a former member of the Students for a Democratic Society,
a radical group that we've covered a couple of times,
told Bostonia Magazine, quote, I remember cleaning a head wound
and applying a butterfly bandage to the head of a
minister who was clubbed by the police seeking to arrest him.
(38:53):
There were thousands of such cases. The need has continued
ever since, and part of this street metic stuff grew
out of a need of having an option other than hospitals,
because cops would go from the protests to the hospitals
to arrest everyone who would. Well, if you suffer police violence,
you were at the protest, and you're guilty right right.
(39:16):
I remember being in Greece at one point and the
anarchist doctors were preventing the police from entering the hospital
to arrest the immigrants who they had beaten up. Oh no,
is the hunger striking, Like immigrants were hunger striking and
then getting so sick that they ended up in the hospital,
and then the police would come and try and arrest
(39:37):
people there. Also, the police would come after protests and
do the same thing, try to find the people that
beat up and arrest them. And there was like a
strong culture there of doctors who are like, no, no,
you can't come in here and do this. Just terrifying.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
And I don't know, it's an interesting dynamic between er
doctors because it's traditional er doctors that are faced with
the front facing of the police, you know, in the
medical community for the most part, and there's an interesting
dynamic where you know, they'll work together, they will oftentimes
be brought somebody, or they'll take care of the police
themselves when they come in. But then there is this
(40:14):
tension between what the doctors want to do for the
patient or what the police want for that patient. And
still like every now and then you'll see like an
er doctor get like arrested because they won't comply with
some requests from the police regarding a patient that's been
brought in for them. So it is interesting that that
(40:34):
dynamic still exists. It's also this time, and I'm sure
this was happening at this time. This is when tear
gas was first being used in the United States, I think,
and it was against protesters in these civil rights marches
in the sixties mid sixties, So this is when tear gas,
which is still an issue, was first being used.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
That makes sense. I can't remember enough of the history.
I've written the history of tear gas before, so frustrated
about like I know some of I want to say
that they used it at the that Veterans March after
World War Two, when all the veterans were like, how
come you never paid us in marching on Washington. But
I actually could be wrong about that, and absolutely they
(41:16):
were using it like crazy here, and that's I think
war widespread use came, or if not the first time used.
Sorry I'm being fantic about a thing I don't remember
very well.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
No, they did have it, I mean, tear gas was
around it. It was actually first in World War One,
it was the first time, like it was developed, so
they had it by then, so I would not be surprised.
And we did an episode not too long ago on
you know, Street Medics and learned a little bit about it,
and the Philadelphia police officers were the first people apparently
to test it. Oh there was like they was there.
(41:46):
But then it was really commonly used in the sixties
here in the US by the police.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
That makes total sense. Yeah, and it's awful, it's bad.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
It very rarely.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
There's all these differences between how tear gas is asibly
supposed to be used for crowd control, which is kind
of around like creating like areas that they don't want
the protesters to be in, and like controlling the movement
of protesters, like that's the ostensible purpose of it. Yeah,
and instead they just use as a tool of violence,
disruption and to create chaotic situations that they can then
(42:19):
come in and take care of the way that they
want to. I have no bias. I am completely unbiased
observed of these things. And the MCCHR members actually had
their own level of biases. Well almost all of them
were biased in favor of these protest movements. But they
range from progressive to radical, and they started getting involved,
like members of MCCHR started getting involved in the late
sixties vibe of healthcare, which is to say, these are
(42:43):
some of the people who were doing the work that
we've covered so many times on this show, like providing
abortion services before Roe v Wade, although that's very subtext.
It's like we're helping negotiate bodily autonomy or whatever. Is
like the way it's always framed, you know, right. And
they also teamed up with all sorts of new left groups,
(43:03):
most famously the Black Panthers, but there are a lot
of other groups doing these sorts of things of setting
up like opening and staffing free clinics. Two of the
main trainers that get named in the History of Street Medicking,
which is really starting to build at this point this
culture is Anne Hirshman, who he mentioned briefly before, who's
a nurse practitioner who was part of the Medical Presence Project.
(43:26):
And then this guy Ron Doc Rosen, who was a
practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine and like a kung fu
guy with the last name of Rosen. Yeah, yeah, no
white man, yeah, and he is interesting, I mean, he
sounds like you'd be kind of an interesting wing nut.
He has since passed from this world, but I know
people who are trained by him actually and have really
positive things to say about him. What happens is she
(43:48):
teaches him how to medic at a protest, and in exchange,
he teaches her kung fu. They and others got together
and built the curriculum that was used to expand the movement,
because this is basically where street medicking stops being just hey,
are you a medical professional, come help out right, and
(44:09):
instead becomes the street medic culture is a culture of
people who go through a fairly intensive training curriculum but
are not necessarily coming from a medical background. And we'll
actually talk about more later. There's like, if you are
coming from a medical background, you can't just show up
and be like, I'm a doctor. I want to be
a street medic you still have to actually go to
a bridge training that says like, look, we know you
(44:31):
know a lot more medical shit than most of us,
but there's some stuff specifically around street protest medicine, yeah
for sure, and and in doc some of the first
stuff they go to well, actually they've been going to
things for years, but fairly young in this they end
up helping the American Indian Movement and the occupation of
the town of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, which is
something I've covered before in the show Oh Lord, I
(44:54):
didn't write the year in early seventies, and this means
that and cared for a man who'd been shot in
the head by federal troops who later died. Doc was
shot in the arm by federal troops while doing this stuff.
It's really interesting because you get this kind of awful
full circle where like, for most of forty or so years,
(45:15):
street medic stuff didn't really involve gunshots, you know, but
a lot of the people who set up the original
curriculum were people who had direct and personal experience both
caring for and receiving lethal violence from the state.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
It's interesting to me when you mentioned like his background
like kung fu, and I think you said like traditional
Chinese medicine. I wonder what that meant. Was he like
acupuncture herbs?
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Like what was he he was an acupuncturist. I don't
know enough about traditional Chinese medicine. I'm under the impression
that under that name it is a specific school of
medicine that is not formally considered by the American I'm
not trying to opine about it. That's where I'm at.
But he is an acupuncturist as well. And just because
(46:00):
these people somehow tie together, every topic happens on this show.
Anne was literally walking past the stone Wall in where
the Stonewall riots happened in nineteen sixty nine with her
medic pack on because she carried her pack on her
at all times, and then was at the stone Wall
protests helping out for thirty eight hours.
Speaker 5 (46:20):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
Street medics are like that. They're always the very few
I know are always carrying stuff. Yeah. I mean most
of us should carry narcan anyways, right, but they always
have stuff with them. Yeah, good friends to have around,
I know.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
It's always very useful that you're like, oh, I wish
I had a like street medic has one on them, right.
It's funny I think about the stuff that doesn't doesn't
come with like cars, where I'm like, like, I keep
an eyepack in my car, like a fairly like stop
the bleed medical kit in my car because I'm like,
I'm much more likely to be involved in or witness
(46:56):
a car accident than a shooting.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
Yeah, you know, we all are.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Yeah, And like, you know, I think people should learn
some of these skills, even if they don't become experts
in them. But then obviously it gets into the do
no harm thing, where if it's something that's beyond your
capability and you might cause harm by trying to help them,
you probably you fucking shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
But yeah, that's a tough line, but I do agree.
I feel like we could all use a little bit
more medical literacy, and we could all use some basic
medical knowledge regarding simple things like the bleed. Yeah, the
like concussion, head injuries, bleeds, stuff like that we can
see pretty commonly out and about in the real world.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Yeah, totally kind I remember one time walking by. I
have a modicum of emergency medicine experience from protests and
you know, backwoods like tree sitting type stuff, and someone
had taken a really bad fall on some ice and
kind of couldn't move and like just trying to get
people to like be like, hey, don't move us back
(47:56):
unsupported until medical care gets here. They're like, well, he's
in the street, and I'm like, let's block traffic, you know, right,
But because I was this like dirty punkin everyone ignored me. Yeah,
it was so frustrating that they Anyway, whatever this is
besides the point, I know.
Speaker 2 (48:12):
That's an excellent point. It's a good reminder, don't move
those people if you can at all help.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
Yeah, exactly, because the level of medical care that I
think most listeners should learn is the level of don't
move the person, not the level of be the one
who knows how to move the person, right, you know, right, Yeah,
A simple level of medicine is stop bleeding and don't
make someone's backwards by moving them, you know.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
Anyway, you have these street medics, they're starting to exist.
You have this other collective, the Flying Black Medics, who
flew from Chicago to Cairo, Illinois. I don't know why
they didn't drive, and.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Yeah, that's true. I might have.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
Actually there's a chance they drove there. And then I
messed up my script because Flying Black Medics seemed like
they'd be flying.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
It's branding, what are you going to do? That's how
it was designed.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
Yeah, there was an uprising there in nineteen seventy and
the Flying Black Medics from Chicago set up a clinic
in the basement of an African Methodist Episcopal Church and
treated people during it very cool.
Speaker 3 (49:15):
Yeah, it's like a five and a half hour drive,
so I don't know if they're flying there.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
Oh okay, yeah, that's just around the well. No, I
will drive all the way across the country by or
I will fly personally.
Speaker 4 (49:27):
But you and I both have the same opinion about that.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
Yeah, which is funny tho, because flying was probably like
more relaxing in the sixties than it is now.
Speaker 5 (49:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
Yeah, smoking cigarettes and your PanAm flying and having some
leg room, right, playing piano, like the piano lounges in
the plane.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Oh my god, I want that.
Speaker 4 (49:51):
They are on opposite sides at the stage.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
But you know, okay, most of the specific named groups
of the sixties, like the pan Anthers and then Young
Lords and all of these different groups lasted until about
the mid to late seventies, and in that way, MCCHR
was pretty standard. In this case. What happened is that
the group worked really really hard. They moved into political
(50:13):
pressuring to try and get single payer public health care.
That was like everything. They were like, this is the
ultimate thing that we are trying to accomplish with this movement.
Their slogan, which continues in use today. I think this
is the origin of this slogan, which is funny because
it don't seem like a slogan. She seems like a
thing that's true. Healthcare is a human right.
Speaker 2 (50:31):
Wow. Yeah, seems like it should have been around from
the beginning. Yeah, like Socrates or Hippocrates. I'm sorry Hippocrates time.
But yeah, that's interesting that it popped up around then.
Speaker 1 (50:41):
Yeah, but you know who teamed up with private health.
This isn't an ad pivot. You know who teamed up
to private health insurance and drug manufacturers to make sure
that Congress would pass no such terrible communist laws as
making sure that people can see doctors.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
I'm gonna say blue shield the.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
American Medical Association.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
There we go. They're going to make their way back
into this. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:04):
So by the end of the seventies, the Medical Committee
for Human Rights is under decline and they ended completely
under Reagan. In the eighties, Jack Geeger, one of the
people who you know, went to South Africa and studied
there and then came back and he kept going on
practicing social medicine and worked with two different groups that
won the Nobel Peace Prize, which is like pretty I
(51:26):
will probably never win any Nobel prizes. And I also
like that it's even framed as like worked with two
groups that won it, instead of being like Jack Gager
got the prize. You know, in nineteen eighty five it
went to the Physicians for Social Responsibility, which was doctors
trying to stop the arms race, and then in nineteen
ninety seven it went to Physicians for Human Rights, which
(51:48):
was working to ban land mines. In twenty twelve, he
was talking about his work about how he'd interviewed Palestinian
torture victims in the West Bank. He was around eighty
or something at that point. Wow, twenty sixteen, sick as
hell himself. He wrote about how people needed to fight
for clean water in Flint, Michigan. And he died in
twenty twenty at ninety five years old. Right fucking good run. Yeah,
(52:11):
we had all hope to live as long and get
as much done. And in part two we'll talk about
street medics. I guess we talked about him some here.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
Yay, But this is a great set of the groundwork
for what we see now. Fantastic.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
When I started this, I was like, I actually thought
energy and street medics were going to have to share
a week and then I'm like, very quickly learned that no,
all of them tie into all of this stuff. I
love that the same group that came together to be like, hey,
there should be doctors at the March on Washington is
how we get community health centers and how we get
(52:51):
street medics. Like I just I love that stuff.
Speaker 2 (52:54):
That's very cool, very cool.
Speaker 1 (52:56):
Yeah, anyway, you got anything you want to plug here
at the end.
Speaker 2 (52:59):
I do. First of all, I want to plug community
health centers because as a doctor, when you're in college
and you're first interested in the world of medicine, a
big part of where you get introduced to these things
is you volunteer at community health centers. That's what I
did when I was at Berkeley. I volunteered at the
community health centers there. When I was a medical student,
(53:19):
I also volunteered at those health centers near my medical centers.
So it's a big part of training physicians. Is a
great way to give back. And outside of that, you
should also listen to my podcast it's called The House
of Pod. You will hear amazing fun guests like Margaret
and Sophie and more people that you love from this
(53:41):
whole world here, and we talk about fun stuff in
the world of science and medicine and healthcare, and we
make it a little bit more approachable, a little bit
less scary, I think, and as fun as certain topics
like how gun laws have affected pediatric mortality. We make
it as fun as I think that can possibly be.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
So.
Speaker 2 (54:01):
Anyways, check us out.
Speaker 1 (54:02):
I want to listen to that episode.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Actually, yeah, yeah, it's an important way. Check us out
anywhere you get podcasts.
Speaker 1 (54:07):
Hell yeah, I want to plug. I don't know I
have a substack.
Speaker 5 (54:13):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (54:13):
You all probably already knew that I have some books
that came out. You also probably recognize that Weird Little Guys.
Go listen to Weird Little Guys by Molly Conger. It
is like if this show wasn't said about cool people,
it was about little Nightmare Gremlin nazis not cool. Yeah,
uncool people doing uncool stuff. That was actually the original
(54:37):
pitch for Weird Little Guys. But I put my foot down.
I said that infringes on the copyright that I definitely
personally own and it's totally not owned by That's right anyway, whatever,
Sofia guy thing, you want to plug.
Speaker 3 (54:48):
Listen to it could happen years Friday episodes called Executive Disorder. Well,
the White House Weekly, we cover this week's news in
a didestable way.
Speaker 2 (55:00):
Is good.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
It is the most I listen to a lot of
it could happen here, but that's the one I always
listen to.
Speaker 3 (55:04):
They keep letting me get away with having our shows
have puns in the title, and it makes me happy.
Speaker 1 (55:11):
What I like is watching Robert get really excited about
the pun about ed which is funny though because of
Edie in my mind sense for eating disorders. So whenever
they make that joke, I don't think of erectil. This
function is the first thing I think, but Robert does, right,
And then watching gehre be sort of frustrated by Robert
making that joke. Yeah, that's my favorite part of it
every week because it happens every week.
Speaker 4 (55:33):
You just described my work environment.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
It's the little joy, yes that you have to find
ye in your workplace, you know.
Speaker 1 (55:39):
Yeah, all right, see you all Wednesday.
Speaker 4 (55:41):
Bye.
Speaker 3 (55:44):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website fool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app, app a podcast, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Cool media. Everyone's recording.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Yep, that's right.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
I'm just swallowed water.
Speaker 3 (00:08):
Wrong.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I cannot do the Heimlich from a distance. Oh no,
do you know the guy Heimlich himself? He actually interesting.
He never he's not dead yet. Well as of like
five years ago, he was still alive, so I don't know,
I should check on that. It might be dead. But
he actually never performed the Heimlich maneuver on anyone himself.
And as he got older, he started to get a
(00:31):
little kookier. Well, his thing works, the Heimlich short, but
then he started to like promote it for other things
like drowning victims, so like water going in the lungs.
He was like, you can get it out with the Heimlich,
and other doctors like no, that's crazy, including his son,
who was also a doctor, and so there was this
great drama between the two of them.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Anyways, Hello, and welcome to Cool People, Hit Did Cool Stuff.
You're a weekly podcast where we learn all about the
Heimlich maneuver. That's actually not the topic of today, but
that is the guest of today, doctor Heimlich, but instead
doctor Cavajoda. Hi who used voice? You just heard Hi, Harriet, I'm.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
No doctor Heimlich. But I do like to squeeze people.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Consensually cool, and you are also, in addition to a
doctor and a consensual people squeezer, a podcast host yourself.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
I have a podcast called The House of Pod. It
is a relatively fun medical podcast. We look at science,
medical topics and we make fun of grifters, and I
think it sort of falls into the same sort of
world that people who listen to your show would enjoy
and wanted to take part in. It's called the House
of Pod.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I tend to agree, and if people want to start,
you can hear me on an episode talking about being
a street kid and street kid medicine, where I'm not
at all the expert and I just like learn a
bunch of stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Same with me. That's what I do. I do the
show just so I can learn stuff.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
That's pretty good. I kind of messed this one up.
Other podcasts I've done. You find the person who knows
the thing and then you ask them about it. And
instead I was like, I'm going to commit to becoming
the expert on a new topic every week.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah. I realized that to be a medical podcast or
someone in this medical wellness health podcast realm. If you
want to be famous. If I really want to be
good at this gig. If I wanted to make it,
I would have that Andrew Huberman thing where I pretend
I'm an expert in every single field and I come
(02:31):
at every topic as if I know exactly what the
answer is, as if there is a real answer, And
that's just not the way it is. Unfortunately, you have
to most medical things if you want to cover them right,
you do need to have an actual expert in that field,
someone who has trained specifically for that. So that's why
my show is going to remain tiny forever. But it's
(02:52):
the way I think it needs to be done.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yeah, have it be accurate, and yes, not go to
the one doctor who claims to know every single thing
in the world.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, you will not learn body hacks on my show
or health hacks on my show.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
That it was funny because you say that there's all
these different types of medicine that are necessary, but actually
tea tree oil fixes everything.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Let's talk about oils. Let's get into oil.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Actually snake oil in particular, I've heard is good for everything.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Well, you know what's funny is actually our mutual friend
Robert Evans once tried to convince me that it initially
did start off as a very useful thing. Oh snake oil, Yeah,
actual snake oil. Interesting, Okay, I'd never really delved into
the history of it. Now. Of course, the conversation around oils,
whether they be essential or seed, that conversation is like
(03:44):
been taken over by the wellness grifter community. So yeah,
when we do talk about oils, it raises the hackles.
The hair is on the back of my neck stand
up because oh yeah, I'm ready to go when the
oils come up.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
And like hippie punk world, people try to use teachree
oil to solve everything. Yeah, and it's particularly interesting to me.
I was pitching this once. I was like, well, I
have this problem. I have the skin thing. And I
was talking to one of my friends as a PA
and he was like, you know, look, and he specialized
for a long time in skin like stuff that on
(04:18):
house people had to deal with, right, And he was like, look, yeah,
you could put teach reale on that. You could also
like just I don't know, bomb a neighborhood to get
rid of the rodents. That's fine, you can do whatever
you want.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Yeah, it's an approach.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yeah, one approach is to start talking about things that
are completely unrelated today's topic, instead of introducing our producer,
Sophie Hi Sophie Hey, and also pointing out that this
podcast is audio engineered by Eva hi Eva.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
Hi Eva.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
You have to say hi to oh Hi hi Eva.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
I'm so sorry. Please don't make please will make my
sound terrible because of that, I didn't know I was
supposed to say, hi, You're the best.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Did you watch the show the Pit I did.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
I did a whole episode. I yes. Is the long
and short of it. It's very good. It is probably
the most accurate medical show on TV in a way,
which isn't saying much. The bar is relatively low, but
I mean, obviously a lot of the things that they
cover are real that could really happen. Those things all
(05:22):
happening in one day is pretty absurd, and even the
busiest er it doesn't work like that. And I have
lots of little nitpicks sure about the show, like little things,
but they're not a big deal. There was one thing though,
that I noticed that no one else is brought up
in that show, and I'm wondering, maybe if one of
your listeners knows or for one of you had actually
(05:42):
paid attention to this. But there is this sexual tension
between no Wiley's character and one of the older residents
in the show because they had dated before. But if
that is the case, then he dated her while she
was an intern or a resident or even a medical student.
And I don't know how that has not been discussed
because that's a little bit weird and problematic. But like,
(06:04):
that's something about the show that was kind of Anyways,
I don't want to get too distracted.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
I brought up the show because they have a character
that comes in. The character in the show was like
an original member of Freedom House.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Which would yes, yeah, if you want to bring it.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
It wasn't just a like let me ask my dear
friend a thing. It was like a let's bring it back.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
Yeah, very well done. The episode I did previously hear
was about the freedom That's where I learned about And
then after being on your show, Margaret, I invited Chief
John Moon, one of the original Freedom House ambulance drivers,
to come on to my podcast and I got to
meet him and that was an amazing experience and I
learned so much. But I learned that from your show
(06:49):
that was really that's where I got the idea.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
And if anyone's curious, what the hell we're talking about.
Freedom House was the first EMTs and their history is
far more in interesting than I would have assumed, and
far more recent than I would have assumed. Yeah, well
we're going to talk about this week. You'll be shocked
to know that came up with a medical topic for you.
Just completely shocked. I know that you weren't expecting that
(07:13):
at all.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I mean, although I would love to talk about like
other random stuff like basketball and music, which I love,
medicine is the thing. I know. I did spend a
lot of time doing it, so I know it.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Sophie's head popped up at the mention of basketball.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
Yeah, Damian Lillard just re signed with the Blazers. I'm
just saying, one.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Day I'm doing a basketball episode just for Sophie.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
I want to be on that one.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Oh okay, that's good to know. Anyway, you ever heard
of street medics?
Speaker 2 (07:42):
I have, I have.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
I know you also did an episode about this recently.
When I talking to one of my friends.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
That's exactly what I was gonna say was a lot
of what I know about street medicine is either from
you know, interacting with a couple online on Twitter or
Blue Sky and through you who I I've met now
one or two and done some podcasting with those people,
so I know a little bit and mostly from what
you've shared with me.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah. This week, so I've been doing this series where
I've been talking about the ultra globalization movement of the
late nineties and the early aughts, and I've been talking
about all of these different pieces that came together to
build sort of modern protest culture that has then had
a heavy amount of influence on the teens and twenties
protest culture. And We've talked about the Zapatistas and Chiapas
(08:32):
who set up a lot of hospitals, and I'm just
throwing in all the medical things and then sort of
laid a lot of the groundwork for confronting neoliberalism and
all of these things. And then we talked about the
Battle of Seattle, the protests in nineteen ninety nine. Last
week we talked about the National Lawyers Guild who go
out and do legal observation. And this week we are
(08:53):
going to talk about the early formation of street medics,
and I'm going to weirdly do the same go back
to the nineteenth century that I did last week when
I talked about the nalg because I wanted to talk
about a rad lawyer who represented some labor activists in Chicago,
And this week I'm going to just why not start
(09:16):
in a really similar place, because one of the origins
of the modern street metic movement is people in the
US South working to register black voters and facing an
awful lot of police violence and non state violence for
doing so. The very first episode of this show was
about the Haymarket Anarchists, or a group of labor organizers
(09:38):
in Chicago who were framed up and hanged for some
strikes in eighteen eighty six. See the first episode of
the show last week's episode of the show, and bring
this up as many times as I can. Two of
the main characters in that are Lucy Parsons, who was
born enslaved, and her husband, although they couldn't be legally
married because of miscegenation laws, Albert Parsons. Albert, for his part,
(09:58):
survived being shot by white bigots for trying to register
black voters in the South. He survived that he didn't
survive getting hanged by the state literally for the crime
of being an anarchist, but that's a different story. So
the fact that someone got shot trying to register black
voters in the late eighteen sixties, right, and then you
can just fast forward ninety years and watch people get
(10:20):
shot for trying to register black voters in the South.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
Yeah, yeah, which is also not that long ago.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
Yeah, totally. During the early civil rights era, the very
beginning of the nineteen sixties, you had activists from the
North who poured into the South to coordinate with Southern
activists to help register people to vote. And we've talked
about that era a fair amount on this show, including
episodes where we talked about the armed, nonviolent civil rights movement,
about how the things we understand about the civil rights
(10:48):
movement and the relationship with political violence, or rather their
actual relationship is far more nuanced than what we assume
them to be, because an awful lot of violence was
enacted onto people for trying to desegregate the country, to
say nothing of the violence enacted onto people who ended
chattel slavery, the bloodiest war in the United States history.
(11:08):
Wherever there is violence, there are people trying to repair
the wounds caused by that violence, and of course, poverty
and racism are also forms of violence, and so we'll
get to this a little later, but you get these
essentially activists, although they don't even necessarily need to feel
like activist doctors who are like, well, actually, poverty is
(11:31):
the thing causing the damage to my patient that needs
to be addressed.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
It's funny because people these days will say that medicine
shouldn't be political, and in a way that is absolutely true.
But historically and currently, there is no way, unfortunately to
separate medicine and politics. And it's interesting to hear this
historical perspective, obviously because it's always been that way here.
But it's hard to be paying attention to public health
(11:59):
issues not consider massive political ramifications.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, God, especially right now, I feel like this even
kind of accidentally ties into the thing I'm planning to
do kind of once they finish all of these pieces
that come together around protest is I want to start
doing the work that was done delay the groundwork for
the things that we take for granted that are currently
being taken away from us, like public health initiatives. You know, yeah, absolutely,
so people are going down white and black are going
(12:27):
down to help register black voters and they're getting hurt
in the process. So in nineteen sixty three, a bunch
of medical professionals formed an affinity group that they called
the Medical Committee for Civil Rights or MCCR, and this
particular group of people they went to the March on
Washington and then they decided to volunteer at that they
(12:49):
had affinity group. They go to the March on Washington
and they're like, well, next year's big thing is Freedom Summer,
another one of these registration drives. Right, they changed their
name to the Medical Committee for Human Rights. And this
group is the mother of the Street medic movement and
also the mother of a ton of other stuff besides this,
(13:09):
which is another thing that I come up all the time.
There's all of these like really discrete groups that we
think about and then we look back and we're like, oh,
like eight people invented like all of those things in
the nineteen forties or whatever. Yeah, So, in the spring
of nineteen sixty four, when around one thousand volunteers came
to Mississippi to register voters Freedom Summer, around one hundred
(13:30):
of them were medical professionals, especially doctors and nurses working
with MCCHR. Their arrival was coordinated by doctor Robert Smith,
one of the first black physicians in Mississippi. And I
think that's important to highlight. One because Robert Smith is
the name of the guy from the Cure, and I
think it's funny. And two because we often present white
(13:50):
heroes coming from the North, or we even kind of
present like white wannabe saviors coming from the North and
not address the fact that this was coordinated in solidarity
with people working on the ground. Who are you know,
one of the black doctors in Mississippi.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
That's something that's really nice about what we did. When
you talk to me about the Freedom House people is
they're going to make a movie out of it. I
know that's coming down the pipeline. Yeah, I'm about ninety
certain it's going to probably start someone like Timothy Shallow
May as like the one token white guy in the
Freedom House. Yeah, the story about everyone else, all the
(14:30):
African American guys, who were the people doing all the work.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
Yes, Macbie knows who Chalo May is.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
Nope, nope, Okay, I.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Assume he was a white man. Hold on, I bet
if I look him up. See. The problem is that
I'm a little bit face blind and a lot of
it name blind, Shalla May okay, Timothy Shallo. Ma, let's
see Dune I assume Oh yeah, yeah, yeah this guy. No, totally, Yeah,
it's the Dune man. I understand, Dune guy. Yeah, I understand.
(15:00):
And modern society that I live in, I don't live
entirely in books set in the nineteen or eighteen sixties. Yeah, totally,
so exactly that. And there are ways that you can
tell these stories to focus on like some of the
white people and the way a lot of these stories
are told does that. And I'm going to try and
(15:22):
undo that where I can, and I'm not going to
totally succeed, but I will say there was a white
person heavily involved in this as the villain. The head
of the Mississippi Department of Health was a bigot and
segregationist named Archie Gray, which is a good name for
a shitty racist.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
It's a bad guy named Yeah. It's sort of the
opposite of Robert Smith, which is always someone cool. If
your name is Archie, I'm sorry for your three listeners
named Archie.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
You're finding it up Hill Battle, Yeah, yeah, you're finding
about Bill Battle. And then Gray is just a villain's
last name, and that's fine. You can lean into it
and be a good person who's kind of a villain,
or you can just be Archie Gray and be a
biggot and segregationist. The Mississippi Department of healthhit ahead of
it and he was like, yeah, I won't be giving
you all licenses to practice in Mississippi. So all of
(16:09):
these out of town doctors come and they're like, hey,
we're going to practice, and he's like, no, you're not.
I don't like you. They couldn't practice medicine formally, despite
all of them being professionals in the field, and so
they started doing what they could. Some of them formed
the Medical Presence Project to specifically provide medical care at protests,
(16:31):
making them the first street medic collective I've found in
anything I've ever read. And when I've talked to street
medics about their history, they're going to point to the MPP,
the Medical Presence Project, as the first one.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Very cool.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
But the second thing that those people will tell me
is they'll say, Margaret, but what about those goods and services?
You'll be shocked how much this comes up in my
regular life. I'll just be talking to people, and people
be like, but Margaret, I always go to you to
find out about goods and services, and so I know
you've been telling me history like a normal person at
a party does, But why don't you tell us about stuff?
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Yeah, Well, like, if people are hanging out with you
face to face, they still want the podcast experience, so
you have to give it to them. That's right.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
I totally never make accidental adtivots in the middle of conversation.
That would be weird. It's like a bathroom break, that's
a yeah, totally. Anyway, here's some ads and we're back.
So the Medical Presence Project and just the people who
(17:32):
went down there, one hundred or so people who went
down there, they started helping out the rest of the
thousand or so volunteers, and they also started serving some
of basically the longtime activists were burned out like hell,
and so they were suffering from what at the time
was being called battle fatigue. And I love that there
are just like like PTSD is just named a different thing.
(17:53):
At any given decade, it seems like I'm wondering what's next,
because clearly people were like, can you believe they used
to call it? Like when it was. I don't know
what came before shell shock, but like whenever game before
shell shock, they were like, man, you can believe they
used to call it that instead of shell shock. We
now understand this.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
Yeah, what was the harsher version of shell shock? That
is funny? Yeah, sure there was something terrible.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
And then eventually people are gonna be like PTSD, what
an antiquated, old timy way of putting it.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
I think they're going to go back to something like
the phrases my kids uses, like Italian brain rot. I
don't know what it means, but it's like these phrases
that are like Italian uh yeah, it's like a gen
Z term for like being online too much. I think, Okay,
I don't want to go into because I don't know
enough about it to mention it. And hopefully there's nothing
really problematic.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
The podcast where we pretend to understand slang of the youth,
that'd be really popular. Everyone love it.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Yeah, yeah, your own children get you canceled.
Speaker 4 (18:46):
I like that.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
That's you know, it's the ones you love, they're the
ones that hurts you the most.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
I'm glad it was you, son.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Oh funny.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
One volunteer doctor Lee Hoffman described his activities that summer
like this, I think this is a given day. Quote.
Attended a civil rights worker who was beaten over the head,
played football with local high school boys. Visited several sick
local people with nurse, was arrested for being out after curfew,
put a lock on a freedom house. Attended funeral at
(19:21):
request of a terminal patient I had seen earlier. And
so they're just going down there and trying to be helpful,
trying to be useful. The nineteen sixty six Orientation Manual
to the MCCHR described the medical presence project the street
medic part of it this way. Quote. Just the presence
(19:44):
of health personnel has been found extraordinarily useful in allaying
apprehensions about disease and injury in the civil rights workers.
There also seems to be a preventative aspect to medical presence.
Actual violence seems to occur less often if it is
known that medical professionals are present, particularly when civil rights
workers are visited in jail, at the time of imprisonment
(20:07):
or thereafter regularly. In addition, medical personnel should anticipate violence
in terms of specific projects and localities and be present
at the right place at the right time. Thus, medical
personnel should be an intimate contact with civil rights organizations
at all times and be aware of any immediately planned activities.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
I feel like this is.
Speaker 5 (20:28):
All an elaborate plan that you've concocted, Margaret to guilt
me into doing more work at protests than I do.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
That's the thing though, right is like you're like, we
also just still go into your day job and help
people with very dramatic problems.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
You know, I have so much respect for the people
doing this. You know, doctors are generally a risk averse group.
That's a big part of like why that's true. We
went into this job and the first place, and you know,
we think of the safest thing in every possible situation.
That's part of what makes us good. We don't think
outside the box in some ways, you know, we're very
(21:08):
linear thinkers. So for people that have the training that
they could have focused their time and energy on going
out and building a practice and making money or doing
whatever they were going to do, to do this instead.
I mean, obviously I'm a fan because it's my profession,
but I'm so impressed with these people doing this. It
(21:29):
seems to me it's such a zig when people would
expect them to zag, and I appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
No, that's actually a really interesting point about Like I'm
like thinking through of like my doctor friends, and I'm like, oh, yeah, no,
Like that's the person I go to to not tell
me to do the crazy thing, but instead to very
specifically tell me to not do the crazy thing.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah. Yeah, we're the boring friends generally.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Which are absolutely necessary.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
You're not my boring friend, you know, I'm fun for
a doctor, but the bar is low.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
So one of the other things that they learned was
that like of the people down there, they tended to
be a little bit older, right, and so they also
tended to be a kind of counterbalancing force almost generationally,
and like, not that older people are necessarily wiser. In fact,
the older people are usually more risk averse, right, because
(22:19):
they've seen what happens to all their friends when people
aren't risk averse. But of like a thousand people going down,
a greater percentage of the older folks who went down,
which I have a feeling means they were like thirty,
But like, right, I don't actually know, because the problem
is that when I read things about like people who
are live in the sixties. A lot of them are
still alive today and they're very old, and so I'm like, ah, yes,
(22:39):
and so they sort of in my head are.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Still old back then, you know, right, they were always sixty.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
I mean when you see pictures of them. The funny
thing is, you know, we always look at pictures. I
don't know, there's probably a name for the phenomenon, but like,
whenever you look at pictures of people our age back then,
they look so much older. Like when they showed like
the cast of the TV show Cheers, which you probably
never watched, they have like this meme where that shows
you all their pictures and then their ages above it.
(23:06):
And the characters that you assumed were always sixty when
the show started were all like twenty nine, thirty three.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Yeah, totally totally. And it's just like these styles have changed,
and like, yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
Like the Golden Girls, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
You brought that up. You were telling me that, like
they were all not incredibly old.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, Blant was like forty something. Yeah, fuck, we're just
super young. Final by the way, just laying everyone, No, yeah,
the forties are the new teens.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Great, That's why I'm getting into skateboarding. Anyway. Uh No,
So after Freedom Summer, they get back and they're like,
you know what, We're going to keep MCCHR around. And
they hired paid staff, and they opened chapters in a
bunch of different cities, and they helped out civil rights workers.
They helped out people in their cities who had no
access to medical care. They picketed the American Medical Association
(23:57):
because it lets state local affiliates deny black doctors memberships
until the late sixties. And yeah, sorry, we'll probably gonna
talk more about them. I don't know that much about them,
But whenever I do these episodes, whenever there's like the
big institutional things still around, you look back and like
in the nineteen tens, they were just monsters.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Right, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, You're like, I wonder if they still are.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
I don't know. They've always been conservative, They've leaned conservative,
at least historically.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Okay. In nineteen sixty six, Martin Luther King Junior spoke
at their convention at the MCCHR convention and said, quote,
of all the forms of inequality injustice and healthcare is
the most shocking and inhumane, and street medics have been
at the forefront of developing protocols for dealing with chemical weapons.
(24:47):
They're doing all of this stuff right, because the world
doesn't get boring in nineteen sixty six. There's a lot
going on seed pretty much the entire first year of
this show. Street Medics are the forefront of developing protocols
for dealing with chemical weapons for reasonably obvious reasons. And
I'm not going to get into the specifics of the
different protocols they developed on air, because the first practice
(25:08):
they developed, which was later adapted by the US military,
can actually make the condition worse when done improperly, and
because of that complication, by the end of the twentieth century,
Street Medics developed yet another protocol, one that is safer.
These days, every street medic I know spends their free
time proselytizing the virtues of just using water for eye
(25:30):
flushes for chemical weapons. Yes, not milk, not milk. I'm
going to end up custom writing an ad that's just
not milk. That's the ad, not milk.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah, the milk thing is funny because it's so persistent,
and every time there's a new round of protests that
comes up, you see like Instagram or TikTok, people talking
about using milk, because on some level it seems like
it would make sense if there's something your eye you
feel like it's acidic, and maybe the milk.
Speaker 1 (25:56):
It will cultualize it.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Yeah, but it is not the case. Just water, water, water, water,
h lots of water, more water than you think.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Yeah, and there are specific conditions in hospital situations or
whatever where there's other protocols that people use. But like
in the field, imagine going to jail covered in milk.
Just imagine that and then think, wouldn't I rather be
covered in water? Right now?
Speaker 2 (26:24):
Jesus Christ, milk was a bad choice.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
I never did that math, but wow, yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
That was what like, because I knew it was like
not true for a very long time. Sure, but it
was when a street medic friend of mine was just like, yeah, now,
imagine that you're going to spend like the next forty
eight hours in lockup with no access to shower and
you're just covered in milk. That's getting worse.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
For a little while, mcchr toyed with the idea of
considering itself politically neutral, but as the nineteen sixties went on,
a majority of them agreed we're not bystanders, we are
aligned directly with the movements that they cared for. And
what's interesting last week we talked about the National Lawyer's
Guild and it's a very very similar origin. It's a
(27:09):
couple decades earlier, but by the nineteen sixties, the National
Lawyer's Guild was also like, look, we are part of
these movements, we care about these movements. We're not going
to pretend like we're neutral. That doesn't going to stop
us from doing our jobs, which involves a certain amount of,
you know, taking a little bit of a step back
from certain things.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Right, I'm sorry, just for my clarification. So the MCCHR,
that's the Medical Committee for Human Rights. Yeah, and that
sort of came from that Medical Committee for Civil Rights.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
And just roughly speaking, is there a sense of how
big it was? I'm assuming and my brain's having a
hard time imagining like whether or not this is a
room of like ten people or hundreds, or was there
any sense of like how large this organization was.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
I don't have numbers in this script. And then I've
read a lot of different sources about this early stuff,
and I know there's chapters in a bunch of different cities.
I am guessing in the like high hundreds, that's my guess.
I know they started off with about one hundred. They
started off going down there with about one hundred people.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Oh see, that's rad. That's actually so much bigger than
my mind had envisioned. And I also didn't know that
it was in multiple places. That's really Yeah, that's actually
pretty I guess I'm surprised I haven't heard about them,
but I guess I shouldn't be.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
No, it interesting because like they're sort of seen as
a little bit the precursor and a little bit like
a little bit more politically neutral than the like street
medic thing that's going to break out from it. You know,
a lot of different things are going to come out
of it, and actually the whole we'll get to something cool.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Okay, okay.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
So one of the major figures who provides a through
line across this history of street medics is named Anne Hirshman,
and she wrote in a newsletter at that time that
MCCHR members must quote take our stand first as part
diticipants in the struggles that will be taking place against
war and oppression, and then use our skills and share
our skills if they are needed they also the thing
(29:08):
that I just said, I was going to say, really soon,
the community health center movement comes from this oh shit, yeah,
and that is very widespread across the countries.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Most of what I've read of the histories of the
community health center movement credits to Maverick doctor guys like
two white dudes and a bunch of federal funding from
the government for creating the first community health centers. And
you've got to find histories that focus on the civil
rights movement specifically and the MCCHR to find the connection
(29:42):
and find out that they were MCCHR members. I also,
at the risk of becoming the Mally Konger of my
own show. From the show Weird Little Guys, which everyone
should be listening to, I can draw a connection between
the community health center movement and and people fighting against
apartheid in South Africa. Okay, now, if it was a
(30:04):
Weird Little Guy's episode, it would be people fighting four
apartheid in South Africa. There was a doctor named Jack
Geeger who was part of MCCHR. Like so many people
that we've talked about on the show. He was raised
in New York City by Jewish parents who'd fled the
Holocaust that he ended up spending some of his teenage
years being raised by a black actor. I don't know
(30:25):
how much that's myth making. I mean, it's true he
ran away from home and grew up in a black
household for a while, But I don't know how much
of that's like myth making. Because he's a very big
civil rights guy.
Speaker 5 (30:35):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
He had studied in South Africa in the nineteen fifties
under two doctors who developed what they called community oriented
primary care, and they'd run two clinics in South Africa.
One was in a housing project in a city and
one was at a rural was called a tribal reserve.
These clinics were free clinics, but they also helped develop
(30:57):
nutritional programs and shit like that. So in nineteen sixty four,
ten years later, he's in the US and Jack Geeger
is like, we should do this in the US, and
we should do it in the Deep South. He talked
a rich person into funding a free clinic in Millston, Mississippi,
and it ruled and it worked really well. Like I
(31:20):
haven't found anyone saying anything negative about it, and everything
I've looked for it turns out that giving people free
medical care makes everything better, like.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Makes a community better.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
Yeah, who would have thought.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Yeah, but you need like one rich person per clinic
for that model, right right, And they needed a fuck
ton of clinics. So he teamed up with a doctor
named Count Gibson, who his first name is Count, which
is a cool first.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
His name was Count. Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Yeah yeah, and he's actually his dad's name is Count,
so he's actually Count Gibson as a junior.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
So cool.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
And Count Gibson was the chair of the Department of
Medicine at Tufts University. I feel like if I was
in at the university and the head of the medical
department was Count Gibson, I'd like watch my neck while
I was sleeping.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Just yeah, this is free Sesame Street. But yeah yeah,
but actually, when you're talking about the federal funding they got,
this is okay. And I apologize in advance. This is
going to be embarrassing my lack of knowledge of US history.
This is Lyndon Johnson. Right, we're going to get to that. Okay,
We're going to get to Lyndon Johnson's war on poverties.
That's going to be the solution they find, but right
now they're like trying to figure out. They're like, well,
(32:29):
we can't find a rich guy.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
For every clinic. We need federal funds, right, and so
count Gibson. He was another cool doctor guy. He was
heavily inspired by the Catholic anarchist Dorothy Day from the
Catholic Worker Movement, and he was basically like the first
white guy to scream what the fuck about the Tuskegee
Syphilists study in which black men were given syphilis by
the US government because the US government is racist as fuck.
Speaker 5 (32:51):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
So it like people started listening more because the white man,
the well respected doctor, was like, y'all are doing what right?
Why would that be an appropriate thing to do? I
don't understand, highly problematic. Yeah, and again not that long ago.
I know, not that long ago. And so these two
folks team up and they're like, all right, we need
(33:12):
funding for a ton of these clinics. And President Lyndon Johnson,
which is if you had asked me three weeks ago
before I wrote the script, hey, when was Lyndon Johnson President? Again,
I would have been like and giving me a multiple
choice and been like, eighteen twenty two or like nineteen
sixty seven. I would have been like, man, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
It's like I was before I had kids, where every
kid seemed like they were twelve, whether or not they
were like two or nineteen.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Totally totally. You've been twelve for five years now, right, Yeah, yeah, totally,
like I'm old enough to drink.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Oh fuck.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
So President Lindon Johnson was president, and he was doing
his War on Poverty thing, and there was some funding around.
So the pair got the Office of Economic Opportunity to
fund two community health centers. One was started in a
housing project in Boston in December nineteen sixty five, while
the next one was opened in Mount Bayou in the
(34:11):
heart of Mississippi in nineteen sixty six. Some people are
being left out of the story. We've got our two
white men, but in the photo showing the building of
the Mount Bayou Clinic, you've got Jack Gieger kneeling next
to a black doctor named doctor John Hatch. But that
doesn't make me mad at Jack Geeger. He's not the
one who wrote these histories. It's just I'm just annoyed.
I need to know more about the people of color
(34:33):
who are involved in the creation of these The goal
of these clinics wasn't to just sit around waiting for
people to get sick and being like, hey, you can
come here for free, which, to be clear, would rule
and be better. But they wanted to practice what Giger
called social medicine. The social order and not medical services
is what determines health. Is the concept of social medicine,
(34:55):
and it is a viewpoint shared by the Black Panthers
and many other people coming shortly after era. And this
is like my favorite part of all of this. Mound Bayou.
At the clinic, doctors would write prescriptions for food, and
the governor of Mississippi complained about this practice, like, ah,
(35:18):
you're making this political.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
You know, feeding people.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Yeah, and Jack Eager said, quote, the last time I
looked in my medical textbooks, they said the specific therapy
for malnutrition was food.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
That's pretty it's pretty good. It's pretty sharp. My question,
I suppose, though, is you know, when I write prescriptions
there for a pharmacy r. Why were they writing these
prescriptions for, like to take to the grocery store.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
I yeah, I wonder what the means by which the
fulfillment of the food is coming through?
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Yeah, maybe a symbolic.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
It might be symbolic. They also might have had.
Speaker 4 (35:53):
Like a usually have a pantry of some kind.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
I've gone to a lot of clinics that are specifically
for underserved people as a transperson and someone who didn't
have a lot of money for a long time, and
especially when I lived in a vehicle, and a lot
of those clinics would have their pharmacies in house, and
so the same place that you get your prescription, you
then walk around the corner to the pharmacy and they're like, okay,
(36:18):
five dollars please or whatever. Like, you know, it's there's
a lot of a lot of I have been very lucky,
mostly because the community health movement. I've been very lucky
a various points in my life that a prescription from
a certain type of doctor means free whatever the thing is,
you know. And these clinics worked, and the movement grew,
and now there are more than a thousand of these
(36:38):
community health centers around the country serving twenty eight million
people as of twenty twenty. I didn't find specifically about
their funding being a lot of trouble right now, but
I suspect their funding is in trouble right now. But Meanwhile,
MCCHR keeps going just like the well, not really necessarily
(37:01):
the products themselves, I don't know how long they last,
but the concept of interrupting entertainment to advertise things that
will go on forever, forever beautiful, and we're back. So
MCR keeps on going. It doesn't get subsumed by the
Community Health Center movement that kind of splits off separately,
(37:24):
and the Street Medic Collective, the Medical Presence Project help
treat people. What gets called Bloody Sunday, probably the like
fifth or sixth thing I've covered on this show is
called Bloody Sunday when Martin Luther King's march from Selma
to Montgomery was attacked by police who hospitalized more than
one hundred people. And it's funny because like I did
(37:47):
grow up like in the American you know, public school system.
I did learn during the Civil Rights movement that the
cops attacked a lot of people with like hoses and
dogs and stuff like that. It's still just like hard
to conceptualize from that being like, oh, yeah, and then
there's a big peaceful march and a hundred people were hospitalized.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Yeah, this is the one on the bridge, right, the
Edmund I Caridge, that famous picture with the civil rights
leader in Selma, Alabama. Right, this is that I feel
like they made a movie about this that I'd never
watched but probably should have.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
I think that. I mean, you know, I'm double checking. Yeah,
I had to double check just now, but yes, a
lot of the famous pictures around this include a bridge.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
I remember because of John Lewis. Sorry, total digression of
my back.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
I mean, it's that's the violence that you know, people
had to go and try and care for. Tom Hayden,
a former member of the Students for a Democratic Society,
a radical group that we've covered a couple of times,
told Bostonia Magazine, quote, I remember cleaning a head wound
and applying a butterfly bandage to the head of a
minister who was clubbed by the police seeking to arrest him.
(38:53):
There were thousands of such cases. The need has continued
ever since, and part of this street metic stuff grew
out of a need of having an option other than hospitals,
because cops would go from the protests to the hospitals
to arrest everyone who would. Well, if you suffer police violence,
you were at the protest, and you're guilty right right.
(39:16):
I remember being in Greece at one point and the
anarchist doctors were preventing the police from entering the hospital
to arrest the immigrants who they had beaten up. Oh no,
is the hunger striking, Like immigrants were hunger striking and
then getting so sick that they ended up in the hospital,
and then the police would come and try and arrest
(39:37):
people there. Also, the police would come after protests and
do the same thing, try to find the people that
beat up and arrest them. And there was like a
strong culture there of doctors who are like, no, no,
you can't come in here and do this. Just terrifying.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
And I don't know, it's an interesting dynamic between er
doctors because it's traditional er doctors that are faced with
the front facing of the police, you know, in the
medical community for the most part, and there's an interesting
dynamic where you know, they'll work together, they will oftentimes
be brought somebody, or they'll take care of the police
themselves when they come in. But then there is this
(40:14):
tension between what the doctors want to do for the
patient or what the police want for that patient. And
still like every now and then you'll see like an
er doctor get like arrested because they won't comply with
some requests from the police regarding a patient that's been
brought in for them. So it is interesting that that
(40:34):
dynamic still exists. It's also this time, and I'm sure
this was happening at this time. This is when tear
gas was first being used in the United States, I think,
and it was against protesters in these civil rights marches
in the sixties mid sixties, So this is when tear gas,
which is still an issue, was first being used.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
That makes sense. I can't remember enough of the history.
I've written the history of tear gas before, so frustrated
about like I know some of I want to say
that they used it at the that Veterans March after
World War Two, when all the veterans were like, how
come you never paid us in marching on Washington. But
I actually could be wrong about that, and absolutely they
(41:16):
were using it like crazy here, and that's I think
war widespread use came, or if not the first time used.
Sorry I'm being fantic about a thing I don't remember
very well.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
No, they did have it, I mean, tear gas was
around it. It was actually first in World War One,
it was the first time, like it was developed, so
they had it by then, so I would not be surprised.
And we did an episode not too long ago on
you know, Street Medics and learned a little bit about it,
and the Philadelphia police officers were the first people apparently
to test it. Oh there was like they was there.
(41:46):
But then it was really commonly used in the sixties
here in the US by the police.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
That makes total sense. Yeah, and it's awful, it's bad.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
It very rarely.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
There's all these differences between how tear gas is asibly
supposed to be used for crowd control, which is kind
of around like creating like areas that they don't want
the protesters to be in, and like controlling the movement
of protesters, like that's the ostensible purpose of it. Yeah,
and instead they just use as a tool of violence,
disruption and to create chaotic situations that they can then
(42:19):
come in and take care of the way that they
want to. I have no bias. I am completely unbiased
observed of these things. And the MCCHR members actually had
their own level of biases. Well almost all of them
were biased in favor of these protest movements. But they
range from progressive to radical, and they started getting involved,
like members of MCCHR started getting involved in the late
sixties vibe of healthcare, which is to say, these are
(42:43):
some of the people who were doing the work that
we've covered so many times on this show, like providing
abortion services before Roe v Wade, although that's very subtext.
It's like we're helping negotiate bodily autonomy or whatever. Is
like the way it's always framed, you know, right. And
they also teamed up with all sorts of new left groups,
(43:03):
most famously the Black Panthers, but there are a lot
of other groups doing these sorts of things of setting
up like opening and staffing free clinics. Two of the
main trainers that get named in the History of Street Medicking,
which is really starting to build at this point this
culture is Anne Hirshman, who he mentioned briefly before, who's
a nurse practitioner who was part of the Medical Presence Project.
(43:26):
And then this guy Ron Doc Rosen, who was a
practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine and like a kung fu
guy with the last name of Rosen. Yeah, yeah, no
white man, yeah, and he is interesting, I mean, he
sounds like you'd be kind of an interesting wing nut.
He has since passed from this world, but I know
people who are trained by him actually and have really
positive things to say about him. What happens is she
(43:48):
teaches him how to medic at a protest, and in exchange,
he teaches her kung fu. They and others got together
and built the curriculum that was used to expand the movement,
because this is basically where street medicking stops being just hey,
are you a medical professional, come help out right, and
(44:09):
instead becomes the street medic culture is a culture of
people who go through a fairly intensive training curriculum but
are not necessarily coming from a medical background. And we'll
actually talk about more later. There's like, if you are
coming from a medical background, you can't just show up
and be like, I'm a doctor. I want to be
a street medic you still have to actually go to
a bridge training that says like, look, we know you
(44:31):
know a lot more medical shit than most of us,
but there's some stuff specifically around street protest medicine, yeah
for sure, and and in doc some of the first
stuff they go to well, actually they've been going to
things for years, but fairly young in this they end
up helping the American Indian Movement and the occupation of
the town of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, which is
something I've covered before in the show Oh Lord, I
(44:54):
didn't write the year in early seventies, and this means
that and cared for a man who'd been shot in
the head by federal troops who later died. Doc was
shot in the arm by federal troops while doing this stuff.
It's really interesting because you get this kind of awful
full circle where like, for most of forty or so years,
(45:15):
street medic stuff didn't really involve gunshots, you know, but
a lot of the people who set up the original
curriculum were people who had direct and personal experience both
caring for and receiving lethal violence from the state.
Speaker 2 (45:30):
It's interesting to me when you mentioned like his background
like kung fu, and I think you said like traditional
Chinese medicine. I wonder what that meant. Was he like
acupuncture herbs?
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Like what was he he was an acupuncturist. I don't
know enough about traditional Chinese medicine. I'm under the impression
that under that name it is a specific school of
medicine that is not formally considered by the American I'm
not trying to opine about it. That's where I'm at.
But he is an acupuncturist as well. And just because
(46:00):
these people somehow tie together, every topic happens on this show.
Anne was literally walking past the stone Wall in where
the Stonewall riots happened in nineteen sixty nine with her
medic pack on because she carried her pack on her
at all times, and then was at the stone Wall
protests helping out for thirty eight hours.
Speaker 5 (46:20):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (46:21):
Street medics are like that. They're always the very few
I know are always carrying stuff. Yeah. I mean most
of us should carry narcan anyways, right, but they always
have stuff with them. Yeah, good friends to have around,
I know.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
It's always very useful that you're like, oh, I wish
I had a like street medic has one on them, right.
It's funny I think about the stuff that doesn't doesn't
come with like cars, where I'm like, like, I keep
an eyepack in my car, like a fairly like stop
the bleed medical kit in my car because I'm like,
I'm much more likely to be involved in or witness
(46:56):
a car accident than a shooting.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
Yeah, you know, we all are.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Yeah, And like, you know, I think people should learn
some of these skills, even if they don't become experts
in them. But then obviously it gets into the do
no harm thing, where if it's something that's beyond your
capability and you might cause harm by trying to help them,
you probably you fucking shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
But yeah, that's a tough line, but I do agree.
I feel like we could all use a little bit
more medical literacy, and we could all use some basic
medical knowledge regarding simple things like the bleed. Yeah, the
like concussion, head injuries, bleeds, stuff like that we can
see pretty commonly out and about in the real world.
Speaker 1 (47:35):
Yeah, totally kind I remember one time walking by. I
have a modicum of emergency medicine experience from protests and
you know, backwoods like tree sitting type stuff, and someone
had taken a really bad fall on some ice and
kind of couldn't move and like just trying to get
people to like be like, hey, don't move us back
(47:56):
unsupported until medical care gets here. They're like, well, he's
in the street, and I'm like, let's block traffic, you know, right,
But because I was this like dirty punkin everyone ignored me. Yeah,
it was so frustrating that they Anyway, whatever this is
besides the point, I know.
Speaker 2 (48:12):
That's an excellent point. It's a good reminder, don't move
those people if you can at all help.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
Yeah, exactly, because the level of medical care that I
think most listeners should learn is the level of don't
move the person, not the level of be the one
who knows how to move the person, right, you know, right, Yeah,
A simple level of medicine is stop bleeding and don't
make someone's backwards by moving them, you know.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
Anyway, you have these street medics, they're starting to exist.
You have this other collective, the Flying Black Medics, who
flew from Chicago to Cairo, Illinois. I don't know why
they didn't drive, and.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Yeah, that's true. I might have.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
Actually there's a chance they drove there. And then I
messed up my script because Flying Black Medics seemed like
they'd be flying.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
It's branding, what are you going to do? That's how
it was designed.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
Yeah, there was an uprising there in nineteen seventy and
the Flying Black Medics from Chicago set up a clinic
in the basement of an African Methodist Episcopal Church and
treated people during it very cool.
Speaker 3 (49:15):
Yeah, it's like a five and a half hour drive,
so I don't know if they're flying there.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
Oh okay, yeah, that's just around the well. No, I
will drive all the way across the country by or
I will fly personally.
Speaker 4 (49:27):
But you and I both have the same opinion about that.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
Yeah, which is funny tho, because flying was probably like
more relaxing in the sixties than it is now.
Speaker 5 (49:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
Yeah, smoking cigarettes and your PanAm flying and having some
leg room, right, playing piano, like the piano lounges in
the plane.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Oh my god, I want that.
Speaker 4 (49:51):
They are on opposite sides at the stage.
Speaker 1 (49:53):
But you know, okay, most of the specific named groups
of the sixties, like the pan Anthers and then Young
Lords and all of these different groups lasted until about
the mid to late seventies, and in that way, MCCHR
was pretty standard. In this case. What happened is that
the group worked really really hard. They moved into political
(50:13):
pressuring to try and get single payer public health care.
That was like everything. They were like, this is the
ultimate thing that we are trying to accomplish with this movement.
Their slogan, which continues in use today. I think this
is the origin of this slogan, which is funny because
it don't seem like a slogan. She seems like a
thing that's true. Healthcare is a human right.
Speaker 2 (50:31):
Wow. Yeah, seems like it should have been around from
the beginning. Yeah, like Socrates or Hippocrates. I'm sorry Hippocrates time.
But yeah, that's interesting that it popped up around then.
Speaker 1 (50:41):
Yeah, but you know who teamed up with private health.
This isn't an ad pivot. You know who teamed up
to private health insurance and drug manufacturers to make sure
that Congress would pass no such terrible communist laws as
making sure that people can see doctors.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
I'm gonna say blue shield the.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
American Medical Association.
Speaker 2 (51:00):
There we go. They're going to make their way back
into this. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:04):
So by the end of the seventies, the Medical Committee
for Human Rights is under decline and they ended completely
under Reagan. In the eighties, Jack Geeger, one of the
people who you know, went to South Africa and studied
there and then came back and he kept going on
practicing social medicine and worked with two different groups that
won the Nobel Peace Prize, which is like pretty I
(51:26):
will probably never win any Nobel prizes. And I also
like that it's even framed as like worked with two
groups that won it, instead of being like Jack Gager
got the prize. You know, in nineteen eighty five it
went to the Physicians for Social Responsibility, which was doctors
trying to stop the arms race, and then in nineteen
ninety seven it went to Physicians for Human Rights, which
(51:48):
was working to ban land mines. In twenty twelve, he
was talking about his work about how he'd interviewed Palestinian
torture victims in the West Bank. He was around eighty
or something at that point. Wow, twenty sixteen, sick as
hell himself. He wrote about how people needed to fight
for clean water in Flint, Michigan. And he died in
twenty twenty at ninety five years old. Right fucking good run. Yeah,
(52:11):
we had all hope to live as long and get
as much done. And in part two we'll talk about
street medics. I guess we talked about him some here.
Speaker 2 (52:23):
Yay, But this is a great set of the groundwork
for what we see now. Fantastic.
Speaker 1 (52:29):
When I started this, I was like, I actually thought
energy and street medics were going to have to share
a week and then I'm like, very quickly learned that no,
all of them tie into all of this stuff. I
love that the same group that came together to be like, hey,
there should be doctors at the March on Washington is
how we get community health centers and how we get
(52:51):
street medics. Like I just I love that stuff.
Speaker 2 (52:54):
That's very cool, very cool.
Speaker 1 (52:56):
Yeah, anyway, you got anything you want to plug here
at the end.
Speaker 2 (52:59):
I do. First of all, I want to plug community
health centers because as a doctor, when you're in college
and you're first interested in the world of medicine, a
big part of where you get introduced to these things
is you volunteer at community health centers. That's what I
did when I was at Berkeley. I volunteered at the
community health centers there. When I was a medical student,
(53:19):
I also volunteered at those health centers near my medical centers.
So it's a big part of training physicians. Is a
great way to give back. And outside of that, you
should also listen to my podcast it's called The House
of Pod. You will hear amazing fun guests like Margaret
and Sophie and more people that you love from this
(53:41):
whole world here, and we talk about fun stuff in
the world of science and medicine and healthcare, and we
make it a little bit more approachable, a little bit
less scary, I think, and as fun as certain topics
like how gun laws have affected pediatric mortality. We make
it as fun as I think that can possibly be.
Speaker 1 (54:00):
So.
Speaker 2 (54:01):
Anyways, check us out.
Speaker 1 (54:02):
I want to listen to that episode.
Speaker 2 (54:03):
Actually, yeah, yeah, it's an important way. Check us out
anywhere you get podcasts.
Speaker 1 (54:07):
Hell yeah, I want to plug. I don't know I
have a substack.
Speaker 5 (54:13):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (54:13):
You all probably already knew that I have some books
that came out. You also probably recognize that Weird Little Guys.
Go listen to Weird Little Guys by Molly Conger. It
is like if this show wasn't said about cool people,
it was about little Nightmare Gremlin nazis not cool. Yeah,
uncool people doing uncool stuff. That was actually the original
(54:37):
pitch for Weird Little Guys. But I put my foot down.
I said that infringes on the copyright that I definitely
personally own and it's totally not owned by That's right anyway, whatever,
Sofia guy thing, you want to plug.
Speaker 3 (54:48):
Listen to it could happen years Friday episodes called Executive Disorder. Well,
the White House Weekly, we cover this week's news in
a didestable way.
Speaker 2 (55:00):
Is good.
Speaker 1 (55:00):
It is the most I listen to a lot of
it could happen here, but that's the one I always
listen to.
Speaker 3 (55:04):
They keep letting me get away with having our shows
have puns in the title, and it makes me happy.
Speaker 1 (55:11):
What I like is watching Robert get really excited about
the pun about ed which is funny though because of
Edie in my mind sense for eating disorders. So whenever
they make that joke, I don't think of erectil. This
function is the first thing I think, but Robert does, right,
And then watching gehre be sort of frustrated by Robert
making that joke. Yeah, that's my favorite part of it
every week because it happens every week.
Speaker 4 (55:33):
You just described my work environment.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
It's the little joy, yes that you have to find
ye in your workplace, you know.
Speaker 1 (55:39):
Yeah, all right, see you all Wednesday.
Speaker 4 (55:41):
Bye.
Speaker 3 (55:44):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website fool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
out on the iHeartRadio app, app a podcast, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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