What is it with the French and kissing?

They certainly know a thing or two about romance. Imagine being serenaded with an accordion and indulging in a chocolate croissant overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Who wouldn’t want to lean into an old-fashioned smooch?

But not all kissing is romantic in nature. Sometimes it’s necessary to save a life. In fact, one girl has inadvertently saved countless lives by being the world’s most kissed face. It’s our pleasure to introduce to you the beautiful Resusci-Anne. 

Let’s go back almost 150 years ago when the lifeless body of an unidentified teenage girl was pulled from the Seine River. A tragedy indeed. At the morgue, a medical assistant was struck by the girl's serene expression and the hint of a smile that was playing on her lips. 

He was so struck in fact, that he decided to immortalise her tragic beauty by commissioning a death mask of her face. It was all the rage back then. Napoleon, Victor Hugo, and Beethoven, all added a mask of plaster of Paris to their posthumous beauty regime.

The young woman's enigmatic face became a muse for artists, novelists and poets alike. She inspired paintings and tragically romantic stories and earned the moniker “drowned Mona Lisa” or “the unknown woman of the Seine”. Soon she became a sensation in turn-of-the-20th-century Europe but her influence extended well beyond her time. 

Fast forward to 1956 America. Two anesthesiologists, Peter Safar and James Elam, had heard of a promising new technique for keeping patients alive called cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). The problem was, they were struggling to find volunteers to practise on owing to the fact that cracked ribs and organ damage are likely sequelae of the technique. In fact, some say that you’re doing it wrong if you DON’T break ribs. 

Coma patients, spouses, and even each other, no torso was off limits to the CPR inventors for practising this new life-saving technique. Though as you could imagine, this cohort of willing torsos was severely limited.

Hearing about this new reviving technique, Norwegian toymaker, Asmund Laerdal, saw an opportunity to help. He’d previously lent his soft-plastic manipulating skills to the military by creating plastic models of wounds used for training military medics. They even squirted out fake blood. Awesome.

But one of his best-selling toys was a baby doll named Anne. So, he offered to make a life-size adult Anne doll for the sole purpose of CPR training. Back then, nearly all doctors were male so Laerdal and Lind decided they would feel more comfortable "kissing" a female doll. 

So now they had a body on which trainees could practice their life-saving (and bone-breaking) CPR. 

And her face? Well, while visiting relatives, Laerdal spotted the serenely smiling death mask of the aforementioned "unknown woman of the Seine" on their wall. And so, he created a CPR mannequin with the face of a dead 19th-century French girl, still known today as Resusci Anne. It’s estimated that 300 million people worldwide have been trained in CPR, most of them having “kissed” her beautiful face. 

But could a dead person really look that beautiful?

The fact that her face was so serene made it hard to believe that she was a victim of drowning. 

Usually, people get pretty panicky, swollen and decomposed in that situation. It’s not pretty. 

So who was this immortalised beauty?

A long-lost twin who’d embarked on a love affair with a rich suitor and eloped to Paris? How very French. Or perhaps a Hungarian actress who was murdered by her lover! And what’s this all got to do with Michael Jackson?

SOURCES:

• National EMS Museum: The Evolution of Resusci-Annie
• BBC News: Resusci Anne and L'Inconnue: The Mona Lisa of the Seine by Jeremy Grange
• How Stuff Works: How the CPR Doll Developed From a Famous Parisian Death Mask
• Live Science: How a girl's 'death mask' from the 1800s became the face of CPR dolls
• Laerdal Medical: SimMan 3G PLUS - Clinical Features