During the late 19th century in Paris, a body of a girl presumed to be a teenager who drowned herself was pulled from the Seine River. In an attempt to identify the unknown girl, authorities put her body on display in a mortuary, but no one came forward to identify the teen, who became known as “L’Inconnue de la Seine (the Unknown Woman of the Seine).” According to an article in The BMJ, a doctor who conducted an autopsy was struck by the serene look on the girl’s face and created a plaster cast, or “death mask,” of her countenance. Replicas were made of the mask, which went on to become the model for a CPR dummy’s face.
In the late 1950s and ’60s, when mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR were invented, Archer Gordon of the American Heart Association noticed that medical students who practiced CPR could end up hurting each other. So he and and another doctor, Bjorn Lind, asked a toymaker, Åsmund Laerdal, to create a mannequin students could practice on. Laerdal had seen a replica of the mask of “L’Inconnue de la Seine,” and used it for a female mannequin dubbed “Resusci Anne (or Annie)” because it looked so peaceful and wouldn’t be intimidating. According to the Laerdal company, which still makes the mannequins, about 300 million people have been trained using Resusci Anne, so she has earned the title of “the most kissed girl in the world.”
