Choreographing urban ambulance in Britain, c.1870-1920: movement, gender, biological time, and the city

Modern British ambulance originated during the late 1800s in the country’s metropolitan areas. The fast-urbanising cities of Glasgow and London recognised that biological-temporal need required the time between injury and specialist care to compress. This was no more urgent than in the large number of burn injuries that occurred in the cities’ homes and workplaces. In tracing the origins and choreography of ambulance—a set of skills; a body of trained responders; and emergency service vehicles—in Glasgow and London, this article argues that the rollout of ambulance technologies was a key moment in urban modernity. Using first aid publications, newspapers, police and fire brigade reports, as well as London Ambulance Service log books, we reveal how much of the early development of first aid was improvised by enterprising individuals. This led to the formation of voluntary organisations, the St John and St Andrew’s Ambulance Associations in England and Scotland respectively, followed by municipal services at the turn of the twentieth century. This early choreography of ambulance was organised on strictly gendered lines, which shut women out of public-facing roles before the First World War, and we discuss the ways in which this was achieved, from clothing to learning.