ER1994

[Dr. Oliver Kostin, the doctor who founded the County ER, is now a patient]

Dr. David Morgenstern:
I was pre-med, volunteering at the hospital when they made him chief in '68. Back then, the ER was a glorified walk-in clinic, where you were seen by unsupervised interns, and residents with no training. And the community ERs were even worse. Staffed by moonlighting dermatologists and psychiatrists, or drunks who'd been banned from private practice. There was no 911, no paramedics, and if you needed an ambulance, you called a funeral home. Ollie once said: "You stand a better chance of surviving a gunshot wound in Vietnam than a car crash in Chicago." But he changed all that. He developed the 911 system, he trained thousands of paramedics, and started one of the finest residency programs in emergency medicine. You're all here because of this guy.