The ambulance is usually a van, although there are other vehicles as well.
An ambulance is a vehicle that is dedicated to transporting people who suffer from an illness or who are injured . This means of transport also usually carries medicines and various devices and products intended for emergency healthcare .
Transfer to hospital
Ambulances are generally responsible for transporting individuals to and from hospitals or other care centers. When they are not traveling, they usually remain at a base waiting for a call to go in search of patients.
Nowadays, an ambulance is usually a truck or van prepared for the assistance and transportation of the sick and injured. Depending on its level of complexity and equipment, it can provide more or less services , from life support to elemental healing.
It is interesting to mention that not only vans can be adapted to function as ambulances. There are also boats , helicopters and other vehicles that have the necessary infrastructure to transport individuals with health problems.
Another important fact is that ambulances have identification . Thus, when driving on the street, the rest of the vehicles can recognize them and give them priority of passage.
Etymology
Ambulance comes from ambulante , whose etymological origin is in the Latin ambŭlans , in turn derived from ambulāre (which translates as “to walk” ). This is associated with the original meaning of the concept of ambulance, which referred to the mobile hospital of an army division or corps intended to monitor troops in combat . Ambulances, in this framework, provided first aid to soldiers who suffered injuries.
First ambulances
It is known that in ancient times there were means of transportation dedicated to people with mental and physical illnesses. The oldest dates back to the 10th century , and was created by the Germanic peoples. It was a car in which there was a stretcher. Throughout the Crusades of the 1000s , hospitals were used to care for soldiers injured in the fighting in the Holy Land, although it is not known with certainty how they were transported.
Such a decision was made by the Order of Malta , which belonged to Catholicism and was founded in the 11th century. Later, some Viking peoples used stretchers carried on horses to transport the sick. Throughout history and until the 20th century, the use of horses to provide ambulance care continued, although it changed.
war ambulances
Already since the middle of the 15th century, throughout the mandate of Queen Isabel I of Castile , ambulances were used to care for wounded soldiers on the battlefield. It should be noted that, although the treatment they received was of the highest quality possible and with the collaboration of a large number of volunteers from the European continent, they were only treated when the confrontation ended, so many died simply for this reason.
You must have the means to attend to different emergencies
The French surgeon Dominique-Jean Larrey , who worked for Napoleon Bonaparte , was the creator of ambulances as a means of transportation and modernized health services in the army. He is also recognized as the first to have carried out patient selection interventions on the battlefield.
When Larrey saw that the soldiers did not receive health treatments until the battles were over, he proposed changing this system, and so he came up with the idea of using cars as ambulances to take the soldiers to care centers after they were treated as soon as possible. They were wounded. His idea became known as flying ambulances and was first used in the Napoleonic Army of the Rhine.