I was just wondering when CPR was first introduced as a technique for resuscitation and what was the reaction by the public. I presume it was after the renaissance scientific advances but the only film use I have seen is post 1900.
I wrote a lit review of the history of CPR for the May 2013 edition of Disease-a-Month prior to starting physician assistant school.
Some want to claim that the earliest reference to a CPR-like action is in the Bible 2 kings 4:34 when the prophet Elisha revived a child from the dead
And he went up, and lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands: and stretched himself upon the child; and the flesh of the child waxed warm."
Whether or not this was truly some mechanical exchage of air and compression of the ventricles or an embelished miracle is lost to the sands of time.
In the 1500s Paracelsus mentions fire bellows being used to revive drowning victims.
The 1700's start to see a bit of a take off interms of resuscitation techniques. In 1732 William Tossach used mouth to mouth to revive a coal miner. However by the late 1700s the use of mouth to mouth had fallen out of favor since the idea was that the expired air had too little oxygen content to help a victim.
In 1861 a chest pressure lift technique for resuscitation was described by Dr. Henry Silvester.
In 1958 William Kouwenhoven described a method of 'closed chest cardiac massage'. Prior to this cardiac fibrillation was only treated with 'open cardiac massage' (i.e. slice and dice to the heart and start squeezing).
The prior to 1966, CPR was thought to be a technique that only a doctor could do. At this point a course by Beck and Louis was published nationally for lay rescuers. The first major study of the use of lay rescuers in a medical system was done in Seattle in the 70's. This showed great survival with the use of CPR by lay providers (which oddly have not been reproduced--but let's move on). Advanced Cardiac Life Support (the use of medications and manual defibrillators in arrest sitatuations was taught as a course first in '73. In '83 the American Heart Association set guidlelines for neonatal and pediatric arrests and in the 90's the AHA pushed for the distrobution of public automatic defibrillators.