Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 September 1895 — THE AMBULANCE CALL. [ARTICLE]

THE AMBULANCE CALL.

A Pathetic Scene that Touchea the Chorda of Haman Sympathy. Of the many and shifting scenes of New York’s swarming thoroughfares I know of none more full of human pathos, none that meets with a quicker response of human sympathy than the ambulance call, says a metropolitan writer. There is the dramatic element in the reckless speed and the loud gong of warning and the scattering wagons and pedestrians as the ambulance comes tearing down Broadway that draws undivided attention. But it is in the character of the mission itself that Universal sympathy and speculation center. In a city where human life Is cheap—where a hundred human souls dally take their flight into the unknown, and where murder and suicide and fatal accident are present at every breakfast table—death itself excites but momentary attention. But there is something that appeals more powerfully to the sympathies of men than mere death—and that Is human suffering, and there Is something that more readily rouses the slumbering Imagination than actual sight—and this Is the uncertainty. When the ambulance rolls by like a thundering whirlwind.scattering everything before it, there is at once brought up in every mind the question of human suffering and the pique of uncertainty. There Instinctively rises in every brain the mental picture of some “ambulance case” witnessed at some time or another. If you never happened to be present on the scene of accident itself perhaps some newspaper horror of the day repeats itself in the wayward imagination in all Its sickening details. This morning it is the account of a man crushed under an elevated engine; yesterday it was an innocent young girl murdered by her maniac lover; the day before it was a boy taken maimed and bleeding from beneath a cable car—and so on from day to day, from week to week, and from year to year, in the never-ending circle of human suffering and violent death. And to me it is a sw’eet reminder of the common bond which binds all human hearts together beneath the cloak of sordid life to feel that within every gentle breast the blood ebbs and flows with unbidden irregularity at the clang and roar of the whirling ambulance.