By Armita Rohani
The most kissed face in the world, and the woman behind Michael Jackson’s “Annie, are you okay?” Resusci Annie is the sixteen-year-old French girl whose face has been used as the mask for the CPR dummy since the 1950’s.
In the late 1880’s, Annie’s body was pulled out of the River Seine, and died largely believed by suicide. Her body was put on display at the mortuary, and after no one identified her, Annie received her first famous nickname: L’Inconnue de la Seine, or the unknown woman of the seine. A pathologist at the Paris Morgue—who performed her autopsy—was overcome by the serene expression on her face; he later asked a model maker to create a wax mask of her face. This practice was common at the time in France, as people would create “death masks” for the unidentified deceased. After replication, Annie’s “death mask” was sold and L’Inconnue de la Seine became a morbid icon in the art world. Her peaceful expression also became known as “the Mona Lisa of the Seine,” as she portrays the same expression as the woman DaVinci painted.
Nearly 70 years later, medical students first started learning how to perform CPR—a new resuscitation technique developed by Drs. Safar, Kouwenhoven, and Jude. Before the creation of the dummy, students would practice on each other, often fracturing ribs and causing serious amounts of pain. When a man by the name of Asmund Laerdal—a successful Norwegian toy maker—learnt of such a new technique, he envisioned a life size mannequin that medical students could practice on. After seeing one of Annie’s death masks on the wall of a relative’s house, he gave the dummy the same face. Thus, a new nickname was born: Resusci Annie, named after the first doll Laerdal made, Anne. She first debuted in September 1960 at the First International Symposium on Resuscitation, and was then refined to further aid CPR purposes.
