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The story behind the dummy used globally in CPR training is one of both mystery and surprising beauty, but exactly how true is it?
On June 14, a Twitter thread went viral, telling the story of the woman believed to inspire the dummy, named Annie, millions learn to resuscitate with in CPR training. With over 17,000 likes, the thread detailed how "L'Inconnue de la Seine" (The Unknown Woman of the Seine) from the 1800s inadvertently inspired the dummy.
"Since everyone is talking about CPR these days, I think this is the perfect time to narrate this story," wrote Umme Faisal, a junior resident doctor at the College Of Medicine And Sagore Dutta Hospital, in the original tweet.
The widely believed story claims that the body of a drowned woman was recovered from the Seine river in 19th-century Paris. With no way to identify her, the body was displayed at a Paris mortuary, in order to offer an opportunity for someone she might have known to recognize and identify her.
According to the story, a pathologist became fascinated by her, and her Mona Lisa-style half-smile. So much so that he requested that a molder make a plaster cast of her face, in order to make a mask. The pathologist wasn't the only one to become entranced by the woman, and the mask began to sell at the molders' workshops on the Left Bank in Paris, leading her to become a muse for many artists.
Famous writers have even created their own fictional stories about her life, including Vladimir Nabokov, Louis Aragon and Rainer Maria Rilke. Most commonly, authors told her life as that of a young woman, abandoned while pregnant by her rich lover, leading to her drowning herself in the river.
"The facts were so scarce that every writer could project what they wanted on to that smooth face," museum archivist Hélène Pinet told The Guardian in 2007.
However, according to an investigation by the BBC, there are doubts around the legitimacy of the story behind the mask. Although the mask's existence is accurate, many experts now believe it couldn't possibly have been based on the face of a dead woman, not least one who had drowned.
Chief brigadier of the Paris river police, Pascal Jacquin, told the BBC that faces of drowned bodies are often extremely swollen: "Everyone we find in the water, the drowned and suicides, they never look so peaceful. They're swollen, they don't look nice."
Moreover, the half-smile of L'Inconnue de la Seine would be unlikely to be found on the body. In fact, it's the half-smile that led Michel Lorenzi, the proprietor of the workshop where the mask was made, and direct descendant of the owners at the time, to believe the mask was likely based on a professional model, as casting such expressions is difficult. "This doesn't look to me like the face of a dead person. It's very hard to maintain a smile while a cast is being taken so I think she was a professional, a very good model," he told the BBC.
Claire Forestier, another member of the Lorenzi family, similarly told The Guardian: "Look at her full, rounded cheeks, her smooth skin, there is simply no way the cast could have been taken from a corpse. And this is certainly not a drowned woman, fished from the water. It would be impossible to take such a perfect face from a dead woman. Some casts taken from living faces are so clear, so detailed, that when you look at the eyelids you can just see the eyeballs' movement underneath. That's the case with the Inconnue."
What is factual is that the mask in turn inspired the face of the CPR training dummy used across the world. Asmund Laerdal was a Norwegian toy manufacturer and was asked in 1960 to help create the training aid for the CPR technique, which was only just established. Years earlier, Laerdal had used the technique on his own son when he was drowning in water.
Laerdal was inspired by the mask he remembered hanging on the wall at a house of a relative. The mask in question was the face of the Inconnue de la Seine. The dummy, which was chosen as a woman to be less intimidating, came to have the face of the Inconnue de la Seine and be called Resusci Anne.
If that's not enough culture crossover for you, Resusci Anne actually belongs to another important part of history. According to Spike Lee's Bad 25 documentary, Michael Jackson was inspired by the dummy to write one of his iconic lyrics in "Smooth Criminal."
In CPR training, trainees are taught to ask the dummy, "Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?" — sound familiar?
Whether you call her Anne, Annie or L'Inconnue de la Seine, the romanticized tale of this mysterious drowned woman has ironically saved the life of many—regardless of the truth behind it.
