Did you know that the face of the dummy used for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training by millions of people worldwide is based on a young girl who was pulled out of the river Seine in the late 1880’s in Paris?
When the girl’s body was discovered in the river it was thought that she had committed suicide as there was no evidence of violence, and that she was around 16 years old. She had no name, no history, and no-one knew anything about her. Over the years there were many theories regarding the young girl’s identity with some stories saying she was murdered or that she was eloping to Paris from Liverpool with a wealthy suitor, how she met her demise is still unknown.
As was custom in 1800’s, her body was put on view in the city mortuary to see if anyone knew her, but no-one came forward. The pathologist on duty became entranced by the girl with the enigmatic half-smile and commissioned a plaster cast be made of her face. Before long replicas of the mask began to appear for sale and soon the young woman’s face became a muse for artists, novelists and poets alike, all eager to weave imagined identities and stories around the mystery woman that became known as ‘the drowned Mona Lisa’ and ‘L’Inconnue de la Seine’ or ‘The Unknown Woman of the Seine’.
Jump forward to 1956 when a group of physicians and engineers in Baltimore developed a new and far more effective method for resuscitation, involving mouth-to-mouth breathing. Medical students actually practised resuscitation on each other until a man called Asmund Laerdal was asked to develop a training aid to help teach this new mouth-to-mouth technique.
Laerdal was instantly receptive to the request, as well as being a toy maker in the 1950’s specialising in ‘Anne Dolls’ and ‘indestructible toy cars’ he had a strong emotional connection to this as he too had found his own child lifeless in water in 1955, after saving his young son from death he made it his mission to help the medical world and assisted with many ground-breaking projects. He used his skills to make a life-sized manikin that was extremely realistic in appearance as he believed that students would be better motivated to learn this lifesaving procedure on something that appeared life like.
Asmund fondly remembered the mask hanging on the wall at his grandparents’ house in Norway, and of being so moved by the story of the girl in the Seine that he decided to fashion her mask to be the face of his new resuscitation training manikin. And in 1960, the first prototype of ‘Resusci Annie’ was presented to the Baltimore physicians. Annie is still used now to teach CPR worldwide and It is estimated that she has helped more than 500 million people to train in CPR and has saved around 2.5 million lives in the last 60 years!
So now you know!