As a child of the 1980s and 1990s, I always knew ambulances as fairly large vehicles based on a van or box truck platform. However, I was well aware from various books and films or TV shows that, in the recent past, ambulances were basically specially equipped station wagons (often the typical 1950s Cadillac with the fins in the back). Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters being only one example among many. The only one I recall seeing in real life back in the day was a vintage vehicle that someone would have once brought to an antique show.
A couple of years ago, I watched an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries on Youtube, and was surprised to see a vehicle of this type marked AMBHEARSE, I.E. a combination ambulance and hearse. A quick Internet search showed that this kind of ambulance (Ecto-1 included) was what was called a “combination car.” It was meant to be convertible and used as both an ambulance and a hearse, as required. In fact, some of these ambulances were operated by funeral homes!
Here’s an ad for one that shows in principle how it was done. Simply make it white instead of black and then switch out ambulance lights, stretcher, etc. for window curtains. Although some models advertised appear to have been meant to be dedicated ambulances (provided with a dispensary, orange color).
My question is simple: why was this deemed necessary? I get that it’s practical, but was it really necessary to use the same car for saving lives and then for conveying the bodies of the deceased to the grave? It seems to be utilitarian, in bad taste, unnecessarily morbid.
And why would you get a funeral home to operate an ambulance? Is this not the responsibility of the municipality – of the public sector? Or was this done in towns too small to afford a budget for a dedicated ambulance service?
For the record, for what it’s worth, when in 1993 I saw the TV miniseries A Woman Named Jackie, the vehicle that received President Kennedy’s casket on Air Force One bringing it and his Dallas party back to Washington DC gave the impression of being an ambulance. But when I saw the same moment in the 2016 movie Jackie, I got the impression that the casket was placed in a hearse.
I’m guessing it’s because both require a vehicle that can, respectfully, accommodate a body laid out flat. If it’s a small community, you’d double purpose, and get by with one vehicle.
IME as a kid and young adult while those vehicles were the norm …
The factory made hearses and ambulances by starting with the same car and customizing it first into a larger and taller than normal station wagon, then adding lights and EMS gear to create an ambulance or adding funerary stuff to create a hearse as a second step. The finished cars were cousins, not twins. And definitely not dual purpose machines.
Did such dual-purpose machines exist? Your cite shows at least one company tried to sell such a thing.
My contention is that other than small rural towns, one actual vehicle did not do double duty. I lived in suburbia and ambulances and hearses of the day had a superficial resemblance. But no funeral home did ambulance runs in their black rig and no red & white ambulances festooned with blinky lights and sirens hauled dead bodies to graves.
I don’t have a statistic as to how common the double duty cars were, but dual puprose combination cars, whatever, definitely were a thing at a time. It wasn’t just one company “trying” to sell such a thing. I’ve seen multiple references to them. Here is Wikipedia’s admittedly short article about them and I’ve seen multiple references to these double duty vehicles. As I said, the thing that called my attention to the concept was footage of such a car specifically marked “ambhearse” - shown here.
I’ve researched this. I’ve owned a 1966 Hearse Ambulance combination complete with a siren.
In small towns, they couldn’t afford ambulances. So they contracted with the funeral home to bring the sick people to the hospital.
Larger cities may have had enough population to justify a separate ambulance service. But when you are 30 miles from the hospital and the nearest ambulance is 30 miles away, it makes more sense to call up the funeral home whose people are doing double duty and are just a few blocks away
A first-season episode of The Pitt introduced me to Freedom House Ambulance Service, founded in 1967 in Pittsburgh. According to the Wikipedia article, it “was the first emergency medical service in the United States to be staffed by paramedics with medical training beyond basic first aid.” The article also says
“Prior to the mid 1960s, ambulance service in the US was typically provided by either the police or a local funeral home.”
“In Pittsburgh, the city police handled ambulance service within the city, transporting patients via paddy wagon while funeral homes provided ambulance service in the suburbs.”
This. Formerly an ambulance just got you to the nearest hospital as quickly as possible. The van style supported paramedic emergency support equipment to reduce one’s chances of being DOA. Before that, if it were me I suppose a hearse would be preferable to the back of a pickup truck.
This is the ambulance that transported Lee Harvey Oswald to the hospital after he was shot.
This is the hearse that transported the body of JFK from the hospital to the airport.
If you look closely through the windows of the “ambulance” you’ll see that it has none of the usual life-saving equipment we associate with a modern life support vehicle. Essentially, it’s a flat floor with slots that an attendant used to secure a stretcher, and just enough room for the attendant to ride with the patient.
The other thing you’ll notice immediately is that not all hearses are black.
Pretty much, if you put lights and a siren on a hearse, it became an ambulance.
There’s a wonderful book about this called American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics, by Kevin Hazzard, which I strongly recommend. This got started because (among other reasons) ambulances often wouldn’t pick up Black people.
The author says that in areas that used the ambulances as a hearse, sometimes they would pick up people and take them to the hospital when there were flower petals from funerals still scattered over their floors.
This started at a time when medical care was much more primitive and more likely to be administered at home. There wasn’t as much of a need for dedicated ambulances because there weren’t nearly as many hospitals, and the hospitals that existed were smaller and performed fewer services.
As the Wikipedia article about the Freedom House Ambulance Service makes clear, until only about fifty or sixty years ago, there was no medical care during transport. That’s well after hospitals were established and providing advanced care.
Seriously, that’s where my mind automatically went when I saw ‘IME’. I’ve worked with so many of them in my checkered career. It took a couple of minutes and then googling on the abbreviation to get it. I’m a prisoner of my long habits
Cf. Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (set in 1930s London), where a landlady finds one of her tenants lying in a pool of blood and calls the police:
The police arrived and sent for a doctor. The doctor arrived and sent for an ambulance. The ambulance arrived and the old boy was carried down the stairs, past Celia stuck on the landing, and put into it. This proved that he still lived, for it is a misdemeanour to put a corpse, no matter how fresh, into an ambulance. But to take one out contravenes no law… and it was perfectly in order for the old boy to consummate, as he did, his felony on the way to the hospital.
