Interesting facts

Anesthesiology and Intensive Medicine, as you are learning it today, arose only in the 20th century. However, the history of resuscitation goes back to earlier times, as who would not want to save another person’s life? The first records of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation are mentioned in the Bible, and later in the 16th century, when blowing air into the patient's mouth was first used. In the 18th century it was recommended to breathe from mouth to mouth for suffocating miners and drowned men. Danish veterinarian Peter Abildgaard also noticed that he was able to restore the heart beat in animals performing countershocks to their chests. In the 19th century, another doctors, Hall and New Year's Eve, improved the methods of resuscitation using different positions of the patients and moving their limbs to support breathing. At the end of the 19th century, physiologist Moritz Schiff examined the heart massage on animals during operations, which restored the blood circulation. Surgeon Friedrich Maass, in turn, advocated external chest compressions and not just ventilation, after he successfully applied this method to 2 young patients, nevertheless for the next half century open-heart massage was still the standard. It was not until the early 20th century that more and more studies of external cardiac massage began to appear, and in 1947 the defibrillator on the exposed heart was successfully used for the first time. It happened in the state of Ohio (USA) with the assistance of surgeon Claude Beck. In 1954, James Elam has confirmed that exhaled air is effective enough to revivive patients, and together with Dr. Peter Safar confirmed that mouth-to-mouth breathing is an effective life-saving method. Two years later, in 1956, the first external defibrillation was performed to restore the patient's heart rhythm. A year later, Johns Hopkins and his team showed the first portable defibrillator. Finally, in 1960, the CPR method was developed by Kouwenhoven, Safar and Jude, who combined mouth-to-mouth breathing with chest compressions. And this is where the method as you know it today begins, and efforts are being made to spread this knowledge to the public. In 1960, these events gave birth to Resusci Anne, which you use on CPR lessons. Resuscitation device Resusci Anne started to produce accompany named Laerdal, which previously made toys, but switched to medical devices, where it still dominates. Interestingly, the face of the figurine is the face of a girl who was found drowned in the Seine River in Paris and could not be identified, but she was pretty and smiled even after death. Over the past nearly 60 years, CPR has expanded and improved and is a very important and fundamental strategy for saving human lifes.

References:

https://cpr.heart.org/en/resources/history-of-cpr

https://www.laerdal.com/docid/1117121/Laerdal-History

https://www.erc.edu/about/history

Cooper JA, Cooper JD, Cooper JM (2006) Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation. Circulation 114:2839–2849. doi: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.106.610907

Debard ML (1980) The History of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation. 5:273–275.

Ekmektzoglou KA, Johnson EO, Syros P, et al (2012) Cardiopulmonary resuscitation: a historical perspective leading up to the end of  the 19th century. Acta Med Hist Adriat 10:83–100.

Gajic V (2011) [Cardiopulmonary resuscitation through centuries]. Med Pregl 64:234–238.

McLennan S (2008) The development of CPR. N Z Med J 121:71–77.