05/12/2025
No one in New York ever forgot that afternoon in 1869. A woman ran across Fifth Avenue, her skirt gathered up and a leather bag pressed tightly against her chest. Her name was Marie Zakrzewska, she was 43 years old, and as the crowd stepped aside to let her pass, everyone thought the same thing: “What can a woman do here?”
On the ground, a man lay motionless. A carriage had run him over. People stared. Commented. Pointed. But no one knew what to do. Until Marie knelt down.
“Step aside,” she ordered, without raising her voice. “Madam, are you crazy?” said a policeman. “You have no reason to intervene.” “If I don’t intervene, he dies,” she replied, without blinking.
While others hesitated, Marie acted. She took his pulse. Opened his shirt. Checked his breathing. Gave clear instructions: “I need an empty carriage. And a blanket.”
Several people ran to fetch what she asked for. Marie placed the man with great care. “Don’t move him like that,” she said, holding the injured man’s neck. “We could damage his spine.”
The policeman looked at her, confused. “Who are you?” Marie raised her eyes. “The woman doing what you should be doing.”
That episode did not leave her at peace. That night, as she wrote in her small office, she could not erase the image of the man collapsed in the middle of the street. “What barbarity,” she thought. “A city with thousands of inhabitants… and no one knows how to help.”
Marie was not an ordinary woman. She was a doctor. German. And a pioneer who had already fought a thousand battles to be taken seriously. She knew that in New York most accidents ended in tragedy because no one arrived in time… or they arrived, but without knowledge. “Something must be done.”
And that idea would not let her go.
Two weeks later, she gathered two doctors and a nurse in a small hall on the East Side. “We need a rapid response corps,” she explained. “Trained people. Adapted vehicles. Basic supplies. Something that can reach any point in the city within minutes.”
The doctors looked at each other. “A kind of… mobile medical brigade?” “Exactly.”
There were doubts, criticisms, laughter. “Marie, that would be impossible to finance.” “Marie, the city would never authorize something like that.” “Marie, no one will trust a system invented by a woman.”
She placed both hands on the table. “Then if the city doesn’t authorize it, we’ll start it ourselves. Whoever joins will work for free until we prove it works.”
Silence. And one by one… the three said: “I’m in.”
The first “emergency vehicle” was nothing more than a reinforced carriage, with a rudimentary stretcher and a wooden box full of bandages, alcohol, and a few surgical forceps.
Marie and her team trained for days on end: how to carry an injured person, how to stop bleeding, how to immobilize fractures, how to act in panic.
But the hardest part was not the training. It was the reaction of the people. “Hey, there go the doctor’s lunatics!” some shouted. “What is that? A circus?” others mocked.
Marie did not respond. She waited for the facts.
And the facts came.
The first call came on a Saturday. A child had fallen from the second floor of a house. People screamed in the street.
Marie’s carriage arrived within minutes. “Step aside!” she shouted as she jumped from the vehicle. “Let me see him!”
While the mother sobbed, Marie examined the boy. “He’s breathing. He has a pulse. We can save him.”
She immobilized him with boards, gave quick instructions, and they took him to the hospital. He survived.
That day, the entire city changed its mind.
What began as a “crazy idea with no future” became the first modern urban ambulance service. New York adopted the system. Then Boston. Then the rest of the country.
Marie never sought recognition. She only wanted no one to die out of ignorance.
Later, when asked why she insisted so much, she replied: “Because I cannot bear to see people die surrounded by spectators. We can all save a life… if someone dares to begin.”
