"What is the role of the ambulance in the American city? Whether by compressing lifeless chests on the streets or by transporting the publicly intoxicated to the hospital, ambulance crews tend to handle suffering bodies near the bottom of a complex urban hierarchy. Drawing on field observations, medical records, and his own experiences as a novice emergency medical technician, Josh Seim shows how this work puts ambulance crews in recurrent, sometimes tense, contact with the emergency department nurses and police officers who share their clientele. These street-level relations, however, cannot be understood without considering the forces that direct ambulance labor from above. Beyond the ambulance, Bandage, Sort, and Hustle advances a labor-centric framework for understanding how frontline institutions respond to a variety of hardships that torment down and out populations." -- Back cover