The Most kissed face of all time!
Any idea of who she is?
Chances are that quite a few of us might have kissed her too!
Let’s get back to history.
In the late 1800s, body of a young Parisian woman was found in the Seine river at the Quai Du Luvre in Paris.
Her body didn’t have any marks of violence or external injury and thus is was assumed that she had committed suicide by drowning.
Her body was carried on to a mortuary and the pathologist present there got so smitten by her looks that he ordered a moulder to take a death mask of her face.
No one did ever identify the perfect, blemish-free body. But casts of the beautiful white plaster mask was sold across Paris, then across Europe.
It hung in the studios of artists and writers from Man Ray to Albert Camus, who described the calm, slightly smiling woman as a "drowned Mona Lisa". Some estimated the age of the model to be 16 years given the firmness of the skin.
Generations later, the Girl from the River Seine was rediscovered when Asmund S. Laerdal began the development of a realistic and effective training aid to teach mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
He believed that if such a manikin was life-sized and extremely realistic in appearance, students would be better motivated to learn this lifesaving procedure.
Moved by the story of the girl so tragically taken by early death, he fashioned her mask for the face of his new resuscitation training mannequin,
Resusci Anne.
Resusci Anne was developed by the Norwegian toy maker Asmund laerdel and the Austrian-Czech physician Peter safar and American physician James Elam.
and is produced by the company Laerdal Medical.
So the most kissed face of all time is of L'Inconnue de la Seine (English: The Unknown Woman of the Seine) or what we call CPR Annie.
I am sure, the next time you see a CPR mannequin, you’d remember the face of the lovely unknown french girl.
CPR lessons from now on would never be the same ! :p
Metalhead
Footnotes