Hosted by paramedics Evan Claunch and Sophie Fuller, Past Medical History: The Story of EMS is an immersive, cinematic storytelling audio drama and documentary-type podcast featuring rich soundscapes and dramatic narration. The PMHX podcast explores how heroes, disasters, and ideas collided to create the world of EMS we know today. Sometimes it’s dark, sometimes it’s inspiring, but it’s always real, raw, and rooted in the passion of those who answer the call. Whether you’re an EMT, flight paramedic, nurse, or just fascinated by the stories that built pre-hospital medicine, this is your podcast… told like never before.
Latest episodes
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31 min
The Weight of It: A 9/11 Story
On September 11, 2001, in Manhattan, sirens stack on top of each other, and the sky turns gray long before the dust reaches the streets. Ambulances roll south. Triage lanes are bui…
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34 min
The Sequence
A small plane disappears into the dark over rural Nebraska. Hours later, a family walks out of the wreckage... injured, freezing, alive. But the moment that changes emergency medic…
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38 min
The Voice That Bought Time
In the late 1970s, emergency dispatch was little more than a switchboard. Calls came in as panic. Help went out as guesswork. And the minutes before an ambulance arrived were large…
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45 min
Disaster at the Hyatt
On a summer night in 1981 in Kansas City, a crowded hotel atrium feels safe. Ordinary. Predictable. Then something truly disastrous happens. What follows is not just a collapse of…
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41 min
Sweet Caroline
On a sunlit highway in Israel in 1978, an ambulance races toward a burning bus under live gunfire. Inside is a young physician who helped write the rules that will decide who lives…
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32 min
A Great Day for Freedom
In 1967, in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, calling an ambulance was often a gamble and too often, a losing one. In this episode of PMHX: The Story of EMS, we tell the powerful story o…
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30 min
The Space Between
In June of 1966, an eleven-year-old girl struggles to breathe in a Pittsburgh living room. Help is called. Transport arrives. Care does not. Her death exposes something medicine ha…
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40 min
Outrunning Death
In the late 1960s, trauma surgeon R. Adams Cowley became obsessed with a question that refused to leave him alone: why were patients still dying even when everything seemed to be d…
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34 min
When I Have Your Wounded
As unarmed helicopters flew into active combat zones, pilots and medics made a radical commitment: they would go wherever the wounded were, no matter the danger. At the center of t…
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26 min
PMHX: NoFX - Episode 4
In this week’s aftershow, we take you behind the creation of The Scalpel in the Storm and into the world of Dr. Michael E. DeBakey in a way the main episode didn’t have room for. T…
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32 min
The Scalpel in the Storm
Before he became one of the most influential surgeons in modern history, Michael DeBakey was just a fourteen-year-old boy in New Orleans holding the wrist of a dying neighbor and l…
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20 min
PMHX: NoFX - Episodes 1-3
PMHX: No FX is the official aftershow for Past Medical History: The Story of EMS.Each week, creator and co-hosts Sophie, Evan, and some occasional special guests break down the epi…
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35 min
After The Guns Fall Silent
When the guns stop firing, the dying doesn’t end. In this episode, we follow the story of a wounded Union lieutenant left to perish on the field at Second Bull Run. He is abandoned…
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25 min
The Doctor Who Refused To Wait
In 1793, the French Revolution burned across Europe. Amid the chaos, a young surgeon named Dominique Jean Larrey refuses to stand idle as wounded soldiers bleed and die where they…
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19 min
Nobody is Coming to Save You
In 1783, a young merchant’s son lies dying on a frozen Scottish road, his leg shattered, his lifeline severed, and no help in sight. Before ambulances, before medicine as we know i…
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54 min
Halloween Special Edition: The Death Shift
In 1981, the night shift at Bexar County Hospital in San Antonio earned a name whispered in fear... the Death Shift. Tiny lives in the pediatric ICU began to fail without warning.…
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58 sec
Where the Story Begins
Step inside the ambulance of history. Past Medical History: The Story of EMS is a cinematic documentary podcast that unearths the wild, untold, and sometimes downright eerie origin…