Nancy Caroline

Nancy Caroline was born in 1944 in Newton

Nancy Lee Caroline was born in 1944 in Newton, Massachusetts, to Leo and Zelda Caroline. As a teenager she worked as a photographer and lab worker at Massachusetts General Hospital.

She earned a B.A. in linguistics from Radcliffe College in 1966 and an M.D. from Case Western Reserve University in 1971. In 1973 she began a fellowship in critical care medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.

In 1974 she became medical director of Freedom House, an ambulance service in Pittsburgh that served Black neighborhoods and trained paramedics. She wrote Emergency Care in the Streets, the first textbook of its kind for paramedic training. After the service closed in 1975, she became deputy director of the emergency department at Shadyside Hospital.

She immigrated to Israel in 1977 and became the first medical director of Magen David Adom, where she opened the first paramedic course in Israel. From 1982 she worked in East Africa with AMREF in Nairobi, managing the Flying Doctors service and writing a weekly health column. She returned to Israel in 1987.

She settled in Metula and devoted her work to cancer treatment and hospice care. In 1995 she founded the Hospice of Upper Galilee. She married Lazarus Astrachan in 2002 and died of multiple myeloma that year.