The Most Kissed Woman in the World
Around the late 1880s, an unknown woman was pulled out of the river Seine in Paris. A girl with no name and no history, it is believed, that she took her own life and was discovered a mere mile downstream.
Marveling in her beauty, the pathologist assigned to her case took a death mask and sold it to a friend of his, a starving artist. Soon, having a cast of L’Inconnue de la Seine was the thing to have in your house if you fancied yourself an artist or connoisseur.
Rainer Maria Rilke made her a piece of his novel “Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge,” poems were written about her, in short: her beauty afforded her a level of fame in death that, being no one even came forward to claim her after her picture was released in the papers and her face began appearing everywhere, far exceeded that of her in life.
The story could end here. But it doesn’t. The fame of L’Inconnue de la Seine continues to this day. A young man by the name of Asmund Laerdal found her face to be so likeable that he made it the cast for a medical training instrument he’d been developing with Peter Safar.
Safar, best known for the invention and codification of CPR, also went on to found the first Emergency Medical Service in an underserved area of Baltimore, Freedom House. Since police and medical responders generally did not enter these parts of town, Safar employed young African-Americans to drive ambulances and render first aid. To train them, he needed a lifelike doll that could be used to train and assess CPR effectiveness.
And so, in 1960, eighty years after her death, L’Inconnue de la Seine finally had a name: Anne.
Resusci Anne has since been sold more than ten million times, over five hundred million people have “kissed” her, since, learning CPR. What ended in the cold waters of a river, started something amazing. Millions of people around the world owe their lives to the ethereal smile of a nameless woman.
Laerdal: The Story of Resusci Anne and the beginnings of Modern CPR
