They call mouth-to-mouth resuscitation “The Kiss of Life,” so it’s just a little bit ironic that the famous CPR dummy comes from a death mask.
Yep, you read that right: the CPR dummy we’ve all seen — and on whom many of us have practiced — is actually an image of a real person’s face. She even has a name…sort of.
The woman was dubbed “L’Inconnue de la Seine” or “The Unidentified Woman of the Seine.”
No one knows her real name or who she was, just that L’Inconnue lived in Paris in the late 19th century, possibly around the 1880s. She was roughly 16 years old when she died, with her body pulled from the Seine River.
It seems like a barbaric practice to us, but in the 19th century France, the unknown dead were put on display in the Paris morgue in hope that family members could identify them. No one ever claimed the unknown woman, but something else about her attracted people. They couldn’t look away from her strangely peaceful face.
As the legend goes, a worker at the morgue eventually ordered a plaster cast made of her face.
Copies were made and sold as souvenirs throughout Europe. The unknown woman became a beauty and culture icon for an entire generation.
But that’s far from where her story ends. Skip again to the 1940s when a Norwegian toymaker named Asmund Laedarl was experimenting with making plastic toys. He was contacted by medical professionals who wanted him to create a life-size plastic doll that people could use to practice a new resuscitation technique known as CPR.
Laedarl, who had almost lost his two-year-old son to drowning, was extremely interested in the project.
It was an extremely difficult one. Not only did the mannequin need to have open lips, but it also needed a collapsible chest so that it could be used to practice compressions.
For the face, Laedarl used the mask of the unknown woman.
Since the introduction of the CPR mannequin — called Resusci Anne in much of the world and CPR Annie in the US — experts guess that two million people have been saved because of the technique. Meanwhile, thousands of individuals have practiced on “Anne,” making her face the “most kissed” in the history of the world.
“The impact of this mannequin has been enormous,” said Marino Festa, a pediatric intensive care specialist in Australia. “It is the face of simulation in healthcare – as championed initially by Laerdal.”
Even more ironic – the unknown woman may have drowned, which means she herself could have been saved by CPR.
“Simulation training has begun to understand ‘necessary realism’ to create memorable learning that is transferable to the real-world situation,” said Festa. “Resusci Anne helped us understand this.”
Historians aren’t sure exactly how L’Inconnue died.
It was once thought she died by suicide, but there’s no way to confirm that. Some people even think she modeled the mask before her death, only to gain notoriety after she passed away.
Whatever her real story was, L’Inconnue has served us all even long after her death by teaching us the very technique that could have saved her life. Instead, she has saved millions of others.
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