L'Inconnue de la Seine: The Drowned Face Behind the Resusci Anne Manikin

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The most kissed face in history belongs to a woman no one could name. In the late 1880s an unidentified young woman was pulled from the Seine in Paris, and a death mask cast from her face showed a serene, faint smile. Known as L'Inconnue de la Seine, she became a blank canvas for bohemian artists and writers, and plaster copies of her mask hung in drawing rooms and studios across Europe. In the late 1950s, physicians Peter Safar and James Elam were standardizing CPR, combining mouth to mouth breathing with chest compressions that press the sternum at least two inches, and they needed a way to train people without breaking volunteers' ribs.

They turned to Norwegian toy maker Asmund S. Laerdal, an expert in soft plastics like PVC that could mimic ribs and flesh. Laerdal had sculptor Emma Matthiessen model the manikin's face on the Seine death mask, choosing a female face partly so male trainees of the era would not balk at practicing mouth to mouth. Resusci Anne debuted in 1960 at the first international resuscitation symposium in Stavanger, Norway, and later versions added a pneumatic pulse, reactive pupils and a paper tape that recorded compression depth and breath volume.

How the Paris morgue displayed unclaimed bodies and cast death masks
The paper tape system that worked like a seismograph inside the torso
The training script, Annie, are you OK?, that became the hook of Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal
Frank Turner's song about her on his 2019 album No Man's Land
Stanford professor Lochlann Jain's work placing her in the history of drowning

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