Where to begin?

With the book a Brown University medical school professor wrote that, for the first time, chronicles the rise of modern emergency medicine?

Or with his uber-achieving, Appalachian-Trail-hiking, Ivy-League-degree-collecting medical student who was so inspired by the book that he made a documentary about the evolution of emergency medicine and even got Anthony Edwards, star of the hit TV show ER, to narrate it.

Just think what it once would have been like to have a heart attack before the advent of 911, before virtually every city and town had trained paramedics ready to jump into action, before hospitals devoted staff and departments to the practice of emergency medicine.

Thats exactly what Brown Prof. Brian Zink sought to convey in his book, Anyone, Anything, Anytime: A History of Emergency Medicine, which then inspired his former student Mark Brady to make the documentary 24|7|365: The Evolution of Emergency Medicine.

Both are odes to those who pioneered emergency medicine, despite meeting resistance that today seems incomprehensible.

It was only a generation or so ago, says Brady, that the vehicle that would respond to an emergency call might be a hearse with a mortician, that hospitals to which people were rushed had minimal emergency departments, that the only doctor on the premises might have been a dermatologist, and that someone having a heart attack might have been given little more than an aspirin to swallow.

There was no EMS system, says Brady, 34. There was no one to call.

Even his own brothers police officers and firefighters in North Providence and East Providence didnt appreciate how far emergency medicine has come in such a relatively short time.

All of this dawned on Brady, a graduate of LaSalle Academy and Providence College, while he was taking a course with Zink, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Brown and chief of emergency medicine at Rhode Island Hospital and Miriam Hospital. Brady was inspired by Zinks 2005 book.

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ERs Anthony Edwards pitches in on 24|7|365: The Evolution of Emergency Medicine