There are few pieces of equipment stored in an ambulance more vital to saving lives than the stretcher.
It is designed to allow paramedics to quickly move a patient from the scene of an accident to an awaiting ambulance, and from the ambulance to a waiting bed in a hospital so they can be taken care of easily.
Despite this, however, the history of the stretcher and how a simple concept evolved into the complex and vital pieces of patient movement equipment that medical staff are familiar with today is not entirely known.
The earliest known medical stretcher appears in a French manuscript dated to around 1380. It depicts a wicker basket with a wooden frame carrying a wounded knight from a battlefield.
It is quite possible that such a basic design had already been used long before this manuscript, but this was the first depiction of such a device.
Outside of the materials used, this would be the basic form stretchers would take for hundreds of years.
This would begin to change in the 19th century due to the Industrial Revolution, developments in warfare and the rise in mountain climbing and by extension mountain rescue.
Mountain rescue teams would struggle to provide assistance that required an injured person to be lowered from the mountain, so early versions of the stretcher as we know it today began to be developed.
Similarly, the developments in military warfare meant that it was increasingly dangerous for medics to treat battleground injuries at the scene.
This led to the development of the first modern stretchers by the Red Cross and St John Ambulance Association. Both of these stretchers resembled the relatively simple military stretchers in use but offered greater stability and safety for people being transported.
Eventually, wheels and hydraulics would be added to make them faster and safer to move for paramedics, and stretchers have been incrementally developed ever since.