A Norwegian toymaker taught 500 million people to resuscitate

In 1960, a plastic toy manufacturer from Stavanger called Åsmund Lærdal put on the market a soft plastic torso with an open mouth, an airway inside it and the face of a young woman with her eyes closed. He called it Resusci Anne. His company reckons that more than five hundred million people have since been trained with its resuscitation manikins, and that face is called the most kissed face in the world.

In 1954, Lærdal's two-year-old son Tore was drowning and his father pulled him out of the water and cleared his throat with his fingers. Four years later, the Norwegian anaesthetist Bjørn Lind and his Austrian colleague Peter Safar, who was working in Baltimore, were fighting to get medical staff to stop moving the casualty's arms —the Holger Nielsen method, from 1932, which the Red Cross had been teaching since 1951— and learn to blow air into a lung instead. Safar was missing one thing in order to teach it: somebody to practise on without killing them. Lind knew Lærdal, who already moulded plastic dolls and fake wounds for the Norwegian Red Cross, and asked him for a body.

Lærdal built the torso, the rubber lung and the hinged jaw. The decision that made him famous was the other one: what face to give it. He chose a woman's, and in 1960 that was a practical calculation, because the person taking the course was almost always a man and nobody wanted a fireman refusing to blow into the mouth of a manikin with a moustache.

He had seen the face at home. The sculptor Emma Matthiasen modelled it from the mask known as 'the unknown woman of the Seine', a plaster face of a young woman with lowered eyelids and half a smile, which Paris workshops had been selling since the end of the nineteenth century and which ended up hanging in living rooms across half of Europe. Matthiasen opened the mouth and took the smile away, because that was where the air had to go in. In his wife's family home there was one on the wall. Rilke mentions it in a book from 1910; Camus called her 'a drowned Mona Lisa'; Nabokov wrote her a poem in Russian in 1934.

The story told about her is that she was pulled from the river in the Paris of the 1880s and that a morgue employee, struck by her face, had the mould made. There is no paperwork for that. There is no name, no date, no police report and not a single record saying who she was or whether she was ever in that river. There are forensic doctors who argue that a drowned person does not have that face. The only verifiable things are the plaster, the workshop that sold it, and what somebody decided to do with it sixty years later.

With the manikin, mouth-to-mouth could be taught in batches: in the sixties to firefighters, lifeguards and nurses; later in secondary schools. In 1960, the same year Anne appeared, a team at the Johns Hopkins hospital published that pressing on the chest from outside moved enough blood to keep somebody alive, and Lærdal had to reinforce the manikin's ribcage so that it would stand up to compressions. The two halves of what we now call cardiopulmonary resuscitation came together on top of that torso.

The mould has not changed. The face you find today in the case at a first aid course, with the chin you have to lift and the plastic lips, comes from the same mask that hung on the wall of a Norwegian living room and, before that, in the window of a plaster workshop in Paris.