From hearses to ambulances: New book traces P.E.I.’s history of emergency care

Did you know ambulance services on Prince Edward Island were once largely provided by funeral homes?

For decades, if you needed urgent medical help, it was often someone from a funeral home who came to get you — in a hearse.

That little-known piece of Island history is explored in a new book, Answering the Call: The People and Stories of P.E.I. Ambulance Services, now available on Amazon.

It’s co-authored by former P.E.I. paramedic Sandy MacQuarrie and Islander Sylvia Poirier, who died in late November. Poirier was a former Holland College registrar and nurse educator.

MacQuarrie, who now teaches paramedicine in Australia, said the book grew out of a simple idea: let the people who lived this history tell it themselves.

“We wanted the people to tell their stories. So Sylvia and I would arrange interviews with them and record them and transcribe them,” he told CBC’s Island Morning.

“We have very young people participating in ambulance calls as teenagers, sending the ambulance around to the high school to pick up someone so that they could assist in a calls, husbands and wives running ambulance calls together, every manner of conveyance from horse and wagon to hearse to station wagon to purpose-built vans by the 1970s.”

The book traces 100 years of change and at least 35 separate ambulance services starting around 1905 — when MacQuarrie believes the Island’s first ambulance operated in Charlottetown — through to 2005 when Island EMS took over as the province’s lone ambulance provider.

The authors interviewed a number of former ambulance staff and their families, combed through old reports and letters, scoured archives and even turned to Facebook to piece together the stories.

In the early days, said MacQuarrie, there was no organized emergency medical system.

“Funeral directors at that time were beginning to have hearses…. So they would come and get you,” he said.

“They did it because — I'm going to say quite honestly — no one else was going to, although there were others that took part.”

MacQuarrie noted that in 1915, Prince County Hospital had its own purpose-built, horse-drawn ambulance.

Over time, funeral homes turned ambulance work into a more formal service. By the 1930s, many were advertising ambulance offerings.