Talking Trauma

As they race to and from emergency calls, as they wait and watch, and as they administer aid, paramedics tell stories. Their tales disclose much about how they view their profession. Their duties are much more complex than the dramatic portrayals that reach us via the television screen. This book reports what really goes on behind the scenes.

As they race to and from emergency calls, as they wait and watch, and as they administer aid to the traumatized, paramedics tell stories. Their tales disclose much about how they view their own profession. Their duties are much more complex than the dramatic portrayals that reach the living room via the television screen. This book reports what really goes on behind the scenes. The reader of Talking Trauma has a virtual front seat in the ambulance.

Here the focus is not on the mechanics of the job but rather on paramedics’ work culture and their well-established storytelling tradition. The stories they tell are cynical, flip, and profane—the very antithesis of “heroic” in the romantic sense. Their narratives evince an “anti-epic” quality that intentionally trivializes the conventional immensities of pain and horror. Paramedics present the gothic as “business as usual,” and mainly their stories are intended only for the ears of other paramedics.

Their stories afford a shockin

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