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Driving home from an Emergency Department shift, Brendan Norwood, MD, had his stethoscope on hand when he spotted a man with stab wounds surrounded by police in Cambridge last August.
Norwood immediately pulled over and offered his help to the MIT and Cambridge police on the scene. “I wasn’t totally comfortable treating a patient on a sidewalk,” said Norwood, who was in his first year of the BWH/MGH Emergency Medicine Residency Program. “But I quickly evaluated his injuries and realized he had a stab wound to the chest.”
He helped to stabilize the 54-year-old patient for 10 minutes until paramedics arrived. Cambridge police honored Norwood this month with the Allen T. McPherson Citizen Service Award for his “heroic and life-saving actions.”
“The MIT and Cambridge police who were there that night were also honored,” said Norwood, now in his second year of residency. “I felt that they were the real heroes. I knew it was safe to stop because they were there, and they found the perpetrator shortly after that.”
Norwood told only a few colleagues about his actions that night in 2009, and most were surprised to read about the award this month in The Boston Globe. “Brendan is an outstanding resident, and it is exemplary of his modesty and humility that the first we heard of this was from the newspapers,” said Ron M. Walls, MD, chair of Emergency Medicine.
Norwood believes most of his colleagues would have responded in the same way. “It comes with the territory of working in this field,” he said.