Dr. Leonard Cobb, co-founder of WA’s first Medic One, dies at 96

Ed note: At Skyline we remember Leonard for his gentle manner and inquisitive mind. He dealt with his failing health with quiet acceptance and kept his smile and sense of humor until the end. We sorely miss this man who gave many the gift of survival following cardiac arrest.

By Elise Takahama Seattle Times staff reporter

It’s difficult to pinpoint how Dr. Leonard Cobb came up with the idea to train firefighters in emergency medical care, but friends and family believe one particular afternoon more than 60 years ago played a role.

Cobb and his wife, Else, had stopped at a market in Seattle’s Madrona neighborhood for a frozen snack when they noticed a man slumped over in a nearby car.

When Cobb opened the car door to check on him, the man sagged to the ground.

Cobb stayed with the man while his wife rushed to a nearby fire station for help. A firefighter hurried over to bring oxygen, but there wasn’t much else he could do until the man was taken to the hospital, Else Cobb, 88, remembers.

“It was an incident where Leonard felt the fireman could have done more if he had known what to do,” his wife said this week.

In the following decades, Cobb devoted his career to researching cardiac care and developing Medic One, one of the country’s first efforts to deliver emergency medical care to patients before they arrived at the hospital. He was 96 when he died in his home at the Terraces of Skyline last week, surrounded by family. 

The former Harborview Medical Center doctor was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1926, eventually earning undergraduate and medical degrees at the University of Minnesota. 

In the late 1950s, Cobb moved to Seattle to practice cardiology at the University of Washington — where he eventually met his future wife, Else Snoep at the time.

Their first date, a UW football game, was the first time she had seen the sport.

“I’m a Dutch girl, and I grew up with soccer,” she said. “I told him that maybe he should take someone else because I wouldn’t know what was going on. He said, ‘I’ll explain it all to you.’”

Cobb was already passionate about improving areas of cardiology in the 1960s, but was particularly determined to find faster ways to get care to patients outside the hospital, said Dr. Michael Sayre, current medical director of the Seattle Fire Department and its Medic One program, which now responds to about 550 calls a year.

At the time, the idea of firefighters providing serious medical care was “pretty radical,” Sayre said.

Paramedics didn’t exist then, and extensive medical training wasn’t required for many ambulance crews. Ambulances were stocked with bandages and oxygen, but little else, he said.