Like much of the current anti-capitalist movement, street medics were born in the aftermath of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. Caught unaware by the scope of the first wide-scale globalization protest in November 1999, police cracked down with a vengeance on activists who were trying to shut down the trade talks. "Just seeing the astonishing level of violence against protesters sitting peacefully in the street, I thought, wow, we need to be doing something about this," recalls Chris Schramm, who helped form the Black Cross Health Collective with other veterans of Seattle. Together they researched the effects of what they called "chemical weapons" (activist-speak for tear gas and pepper spray) and developed a series of protocols to teach future medics how to help. "We had parties where we rubbed pepper spray on people’s arms with Q-tips and tried different remedies to see which worked better," says Schramm. After testing everything from milk to lemon juice, they determined that the best remedy was a mixture of liquid antacid (like Mylanta), cut 50 percent with water — an admixture dubbed LAW.

Members of the Black Cross didn’t know it at the time, but they weren’t the only fledgling street-medic group. Another batch of doctors and activist first aiders had organized themselves into the Colorado Street Medics. On the East Coast, a small "antiwar propaganda and TV-watching collective" called On the Ground had laid the foundation for what would become the NorthEast Action Medics Association. "We’d all been to lots of demonstrations, and were feeling unchallenged by them," says Brian Dominick. "We wanted to do something that would be interesting and helpful to people." Though none of the group had any medical experience, they headed to DC for the next big protest against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in April 2000. There they hooked up with the Colorado Street Medics and received on-the-spot street-medic training.

"I probably slept 20 minutes the night before," says Ace Allen, who remembers staying up to practice eye flushes in a dark parking lot. "There was all this excitement about what was going to happen." As it turned out, the medics mainly treated sunburns and dehydration, along with a few minor head wounds inflicted by overanxious police batons. But the members of On the Ground were hooked. When they returned to New York, they got certified in first aid and CPR and started conducting training on the East Coast, sometimes arriving in a city up to a month before a protest.

Along the way, they found themselves confronted with an increasingly brutal response from police. "Quebec City was an enormous challenge," says Dominick. "We probably treated a thousand patients. Personally, my partner and I treated 30 or 40." When we compare notes, I realize we were in the same plaza when I got pepper sprayed, and that he may have been the very person who pulled back my eyelids for an eye flush. But according to Dominick, I was far from the worst victim in Quebec City. Over the course of the weekend, medics were faced with one protester with an amputated finger (which they saved in a Ziploc bag with ice) and a man suffering internal bleeding from a rubber bullet to the kidneys. In both cases, the medics had to negotiate with police to get the victims out of the protest zone to an area where an ambulance could take them to the hospital. Making matters more difficult, police started shooting chemical-weapons canisters directly at the medics themselves after they realized the medics were re-commissioning activists who’d been taken out with tear gas. "Medics whose first action was Quebec learned more in a day than I had in a year," recalls Dominick.

Police response is always the X-factor for medics, and it runs the gamut from open hostility to active cooperation. Sometimes medics are put in the strange position of mediating between police and protesters, recognized by their special status as "noncombatants." At times, they’ve been allowed to cross police lines or even enter jail cells to treat wounded activists. We get a little taste of this ourselves when, on the day after the big march in Washington, several smaller protests, including an act of civil disobedience, are planned. As the police cordon off an area of protesters who are blocking an intersection, we’re ordered to clear out of the nearby corner where we’ve set up our medic station. We’re standing our ground, negotiating with the cops to let us stay, when Lieutenant J.D. Herold, the DC cop in charge of "civil disturbances," assures us we won’t be arrested if we join the protesters inside the police line.

Sure enough, police maintain their lines, but they don’t swoop down on the crowd with mass arrests like they’ve done in the past. There are few injuries. One older woman hits her head when she’s pushed off the sidewalk and is taken away by an ambulance. Another activist on a bicycle is tackled by an officer who then picks up the bike and throws it on the rider before arresting him. Meeting Lieutenant Herold shortly after the incident, we protest the apparently undue brutality. "That shouldn’t have happened," he tells us in a moment of unusual police candor. "I will speak to my unit about it. That kind of behavior will not be tolerated."

BALM Squad founder Dr. Michael Greger received his first taste of action in Boston during the presidential debate in September 2000, when thousands of angry Ralph Nader supporters faced off against riot police in front of the Kennedy Library. Like many experienced street medics, Greger describes it as an intensely emotional experience. "I remember my first eye flush," he says. "You are like one of those faith healers — you know, ‘Suddenly you can see!’ I don’t know if it was the pepper spray in the air, but I was crying." At the time, Greger was a general practitioner who gave talks on veganism and volunteered with Food Not Bombs and other activist organizations. He spent months researching the history of medics at protest movements, discovering an organization called the Medical Committee for Human Rights, which fielded roving ambulances and up to 1000 doctors for events in the ’60s and ’70s.

But Greger is quick to point out that the current medic movement is much more egalitarian than its first incarnation. "I think one of the beautiful things about the movement these days is the do-it-yourself fervor, and the demystification or de-monopolization of knowledge — it shows how ordinary people combined with simple information can make a difference," he says. Typifying that DIY attitude, Greger developed his own training curriculum, and presented it for the first time in Boston only a few weeks before September 11. More than 40 people showed up at that training (held outside on the Esplanade, after MIT security kicked the activists out of the classroom they’d reserved), and the BALM Squad was born.

The group now consists of six or seven organizers, with a dozen more sometime participants. They meet several times a month in members’ living rooms to strategize for upcoming protests, arranging housing and transportation, choosing buddy pairs, and predicting the types of injuries they’re likely to face. "The medic community are always more organized than 90 percent of people at protests," says BALM member Sandy. As they’ve notched more actions, they’ve expanded their repertoire. The IMF protest in Ottawa in November 2001, for example, was "dog-bite central," says BALM member Kelly, who learned that weekend how to clean out puncture wounds from the police dogs that were literally unleashed on protesters.

Unique among medical collectives, BALM has also begun expanding its medical work beyond street protests to offer more day-to-day health care to underserved communities. Only a few days after returning from a protest in DC last September, BALM set up a roving clinic to support the citywide janitor strike. "It was great to see how resourceful we could be," says Kelly, who describes treating dozens of men, women, and children in makeshift examining rooms constructed of sheets and duct tape. Instead of tear gas and rubber bullets, Eowyn Reiche and the other doctors in the clinic found themselves treating upset stomachs, back pain, and high blood pressure — at times introducing the janitors to new treatments like acupressure and herbal remedies. "It was a way to help people who are denied health care every single day," says Kelly. Currently, the group is organizing health-and-safety training for other progressive groups in the area and looking to reach out to more underserved communities.

As they talk about their plans, it’s clear that many medics think of their movement as more than just a way to support protests. In their headier moments, they hold up action medicine as a more egalitarian counter-model to a mainstream health-care system that’s becoming increasingly profit-driven. "We’re really talking about people-powered medicine," says Ace Allen, who is applying for grants to fund a Web site and future training sessions. "We’re much more sensitive about things like informed consent, and about getting everyone’s input before deciding on treatment. It really humbles people to be on the same level and work together democratically." On a more gut level, Greger remembers feeling something similar at the end of his first action, when the crowd spontaneously cheered for the medics as they were leaving. "You could see that we were all one big family taking care of each other," he says. "That’s what our movement is all about."

I can’t say we get a similar reception at the end of my first weekend as a street medic. The civil-disobedience action peters out after a few hours when activists declare victory and begin to disperse, chilled but happy, to their buses, and we’re left to straggle back to the subway alone in the gathering dark. But in many small ways, I feel like I’ve made a difference, at least to a few people. There’s the bandage I gave the woman on the mall who fell and skinned her knee. The heat pack I gave a woman who was sitting on a stoop, blowing on her foot to try and warm it. And there’s the report we gave to Lieutenant Herold, who, even if he didn’t do anything to reprimand his officers, at least knew that someone was, and is, watching.

As the Bush war machine shifts into overdrive, this protest is surely just a harbinger of things to come. More antiwar protests will no doubt follow this spring, and there’s no guarantee they’ll be as peaceful as this one. With that in mind, I’m already preparing my gauze, my bandages, and my bottle of LAW.

For more information about the BALM Squad, visit www.bostoncoop.net/balm, or e-mail bostonmedics@riseup.net. Michael Blanding can be reached at michaelblanding@yahoo.com