2023-08-02 04:00:03
Most of us probably know – more or less – how to revive one of our fellow human beings. Even if you haven’t taken a course in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR)you have probably seen the technique many times on television (Television is the transmission, by cable or radio waves, of images or…) or in the cinema.
The earliest moments in the history of resuscitation were, in many ways, dramatic. Thus, on June 1, 1782, a newspaper in Philadelphia (Philadelphia (in English Philadelphia) is a city in the state of Pennsylvania, in the United States….) reported the latest feat in matter (Matter is the substance that composes any body having a tangible reality. His…) resuscitation: a five-year-old child had been brought back to life after drowning in the river (In hydrography, a river is a watercourse that flows under the effect of…) Delaware.
Little Rowland Oliver was playing on one of the bustling docks that had been built as industrialization spread to the shores of the Delaware when he fell into the water. He struggled for 10 minutes, then was left inert. A worker pulled him out of the water and brought him home.
Although the child was returned visibly lifeless to his family, the newspaper reported that his parents found he was only “apparently dead”. It galvanized them, and they sprang into action. They “immediately took off all his clothes, slapped him” and “rubbed him with woolen rags soaked in alcohol”.
The doctor, who arrived shortly after, did the same. They also soaked little Rowland’s feet in hot water and gave him an emetic (emetic) agent by mouth. After about 20 minutes, life returned to the little boy’s body. A small bloodletting was practiced, to attenuate possible side effects, and the young Rowland quickly found his usual liveliness.
In this Victorian illustration, a man is being resuscitated.
Authentic-Originals / Alamy Stock Photo
Humanitarian societies
This account was only one illustration among many of the many stories of successful resuscitation published in the newspapers by the humanitarian societies newly created at that time.
These companies emerged in the middle of the 18th century in Amsterdam, a city notoriously known for its canals… in which an increasing number of people drowned. Their purpose was to educate the public that death – at least by drowning – need not be absolute, and that bystanders had the power to prevent the seemingly dead drowned from actually reaching the afterlife.
In Philadelphia, the resurrection of little Rowland made these ideas credible, and inspired the local humanitarian society: the latter set up along the city’s rivers kits containing medicines, tools and instructions to revive the drowned.
Methods have evolved over time, but until the 19th century, resuscitation efforts consisted essentially of stimulating the body to put it back in motion mechanically speaking. Humanitarian societies often recommended rewarming the drowning victim and practicing artificial breathing (In everyday language, breathing refers to both gas exchange (rejection, etc.). Whatever the method, the most important was to restart the bodily machine.
External stimulation – the rubbing and massage performed by young Rowland’s parents – was key. Likewise, internal stimulation, usually by the introduction of rum or another stimulating concoction into the stomach, was common. But another method intended to excite the interior of the body was more astonishing: the humanitarian societies indeed proposed to carry out a “tobacco fumigation” of the colon of drowning victims. Yes, you read that right: Resuscitation efforts required blowing tobacco smoke into the anus of a seemingly dead drowned person.
Illustration: A drowned woman is resuscitated by a tobacco smoke enema.
Wellcome Collection, CC BY
In the 20th century, other dangers emerged, also potentially deadly. Just as drownings increased in the 18th century, due to the increased use of waterways resulting from industrialization, the advent of electricity (Electricity is a physical phenomenon due to the various electric charges of the…) generalized – and power lines – as well as automobiles in particular, added electrocution (Electrocution is the consecutive death the passage of electric current in the human body…) and intoxication (Poisoning is a set of disorders of the functioning of the body due to…) gas with possible causes of death…
A new place of stimulation
Resuscitation methods have also evolved, with efforts focusing more on stimulation of the heart. For this, it happened to manipulate an apparently dead body in order to arrange it in different positions. Chest compressions and artificial respiration techniques have also become increasingly common.
But these changes in techniques did not remove the “democratic” character of resuscitation: it could be practiced by almost anyone. However, its applications remained specific to certain circumstances. Indeed, apparent death could only result from a limited number of situations…
Things changed in the middle of the 20th century. Around this time, resuscitation began to acquire a reputation as a miraculous treatment, usable for all kinds of “deaths”. The people able to provide these treatments became more specialized, and resuscitation was soon limited to medical professionals or emergency responders. There are many reasons for this change, but one in particular has played a crucial role in this change: the recognition that surgical accidents also cause apparent deaths.
When the American surgeon Claude Beck spoke of his own attempts to redesign resuscitation in the mid-twentieth century, he often spoke of what the discipline was like when he was still in training in the late 1910s.
Back then, he recalled, if a patient’s heart stopped on the operating table, surgeons could do nothing but call the fire department and wait for them to bring a “pulmotor”, the precursor of the artificial respirators that we know today. As if everyone could practice resuscitation, except medical professionals…
Finding this unacceptable, Beck set out to find a method of resuscitation suited to the particular dangers of surgery.
A German patient resuscitated thanks to a pulmotor.
Alpha Stock/Alamy Stock Photo
The new techniques that Beck, and other surgeons with him, experimented with then still relied on stimulation. But they relied on something that surgeons enjoyed more or less exclusively: access to the inside of the body. One of these new methods was to apply electricity directly to the heart (defibrillation). Another was to plunge the hand into the patient’s chest, and to manually massage his heart was another.
Beck saw his early successes in the operating theater as a promise that his techniques could be further extended in effectiveness. Accordingly, he broadened his definition (A definition is a discourse that says what a thing is or what a name signifies. Hence the…) of what a resuscitable patient was. He added to the relatively narrow category of “apparently dead” people all those who were not “absolutely and indisputably dead”.
Beck has made several films testifying to his successes. One, The Choir of the Dead, showed the first 11 people Beck managed to revive standing awkwardly side by side as he took turns asking them , in a surprisingly jovial tone: “What did you die of?”
“Surgeon Claude Beck posing alongside his resuscitated patients”
The techniques put in place in the medical spaces resulted directly from the resuscitation practiced elsewhere, they constituted an extension of it, in a way. However, it quickly became clear that these medical methods, favoring access to the interior of the body, could not be easily democratized.
That doesn’t mean Beck didn’t try to get them out of the medical circle. He even imagined a world where those who were trained in his methods would carry a surgeon’s scalpel on them, always ready to open a chest to massage a heart and make it start again…
But the medical community revolted against this idea. She was not only worried about seeing the emergence of “civilian-surgeons”, but also concerned about maintaining her professional monopoly on the inside of the body.
It was not until the advent, several years later, of the less shocking method of chest compression that the democratic imprimatur of resuscitation was restored.
Beck’s view that death is generally reversible persisted. It peaked in 1960, when medical studies stated that the survival rate for resuscitation was “more than 70%”. Later studies have corrected this too optimistic conclusion, but the reputation of resuscitation as a widely applicable and highly effective treatment was already established. And it would seem that it still persists today, according to recent reports.
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