For years, I heard about Peter Canning and his freshman effort, Paramedic: On the Front Lines of Medicine. Canning’s book was touted as one of the key books that anyone even tangentially associated with Paramedicine needed to read. However, I never gave the book much heed and figured it was probably good if so many people talked it up all the time. The first 10 or so years of my Paramedicine career saw me stop reading much, and it wasn’t until the past couple of years that I began to read vociferously again. Eventually, I made the choice to purchase Canning’s memoir, but I am me and that meant his book sat on my bookshelf waiting to be read for at least a solid year until I finally got around to it. As I worked my way through Paramedic: On the Front Lines of Medicine, I quickly realized an important fact, it’s not a good book by any measure.
I’m not going to attack Canning for his writing style, though I wasn’t enamored with his approach of breaking everything into sections that ranged anywhere from a few pages to a couple of paragraphs. The mechanics of Paramedic: On the Front Lines of Medicine are, for lack of a better turn of phrase, whatever. That’s not what I cared about and if you are reading this it’s likely not what you care about either. If you’re here, like me, you are more interested in passages like this:
Describing the words written above is, well, hard. Canning is attempting some sort of weird Hunter S. Thompson dream monologue, but the result isn’t clairvoyant or interesting, at least not as I’m sure Canning intended. It ultimately is an interesting passage because it shapes Canning’s worldview and the lack of humanity he finds in the patients he treats. At the end of the day, Jose is a patient who abused the system, someone who wasted Canning’s time while he could have been busy tossing real patients in the back of his ambulance and providing hardly any medical care as he went balls-to-the-wall to the hospital. (To be clear, I’m salty about that last part, but I don’t hold the physical care provided by Canning against him. He practiced shitty medicine not because he was a shitty clinician, but because Paramedicine in the 80s was shitty in terms of what it thought was good medical care).
The rest of the book continues in much the same fashion, albeit nowhere near as incoherently weird. It’s section after section where Canning says he’s a good guy, followed by doing, saying, or thinking despicable things, then hand waving those actions away without the slightest bit of honest self-reflection. He’ll often approach from a very liberal perspective, such as below where he makes a throwaway statement that he agrees with access to healthcare being gatekept.
The passage below is probably the passage in the book that infuriated me the most. The context is that Canning just finished relaying the story of a call that he was sent to where a local unit should have been sent and the person died. Likely not due to any actions, or inactions, of Canning, but it still bothered him. He came very close to understanding the issue as he talked about the system being broken and how it shouldn’t work the way it does. Canning and his partner, a racist little subhuman named Glenn, are dispatched for a Spanish-speaking lady complaining of abdominal pain. While transporting her they hear a call come out for a patient in cardiac arrest. Then he writes this,
Faced with a system that he believes doesn’t work, Canning chooses not to hold the system or those responsible for the system accountable. Rather, he focuses his ire on his patient. The system isn’t broken because of capitalism, liberalism, or austerity measures. No, the system is broken because of rotten people abusing it, just like this old lady and her family. They aren’t worthy of Canning’s care, their complaint isn’t legitimate after all, it’s not like this patient’s abdominal pain could be anything serious or anything like that. No, patients like this aren’t even worth his attention, and he wants the reader to know he is justified in his disdain and contempt for his fellow human beings.
I recently wrote about the system, I’m not feeling like litigating that again. The long and the short of it is that the system isn’t broken. Canning is completely wrong about that, the system is working exactly as intended. To the system, any patient who is not an elite or part of the bourgeoisie isn’t worthy of treatment. The system is a form of class warfare, but someone like Canning refuses to see that. It’s far easier to blame his patients for wasting his time than it is to confront that the bourgeoise has just as much contempt for his Puerto Rican patient with abdominal pain as they do his non-patient in cardiac arrest.
Canning’s book is revered because he is both an old type of Paramedic and someone who the modern Paramedicine clinician can look to when they are complaining about the system being broken. The system wants us to fight one another; the working class turning against the working class so that we don’t see what is really going on in front of our own eyes. Canning appears smart, he’s able to deduce that those pesky patients abusing the system are the problem after all. Only, Canning isn’t all that smart, he’s boorish and lacks a self-awareness that is criminal. It’s simply too hard for Canning to look at each and every one of his patients as someone being held down by the system, the same as him. He’s not capable of that level of introspection, he is after all a liberal who believes in capitalism. Class consciousness for him consists of nothing more than maintaining the status quo and keeping the bourgeoise in power.
It’s not shocking that Paramedic: On the Front Line of Medicine is held in such high regard, too many people in Paramedicine today are exactly like Canning. They are being trained by people who are also just like Canning. There’s no desire to look at the world from a materialist or class perspective, and thus there’s no desire to challenge the system or to treat your patients as the same victims of the system as you are. Paramedic: On the Front Line of Medicine is liberal trash, it seeks to uphold a world that wants to hold the proletariat firmly under its heel. To understand that would require Canning to possess a modicum of self-reflection and for his memoir to be a little bit honest. Alas, Canning can’t do that, so instead he tells tales of his hated patients being torn apart in his dreams, the true stuff of a Paramedicine hero I suppose.
Lead photo courtesy of Unknown – Ivy Books
