Christopher’s History Fun Nuggets #3
Death, Life and Beautiful Synchronicity Edition
This is actually two stories, one of life and one of Death, which come together in a Beautiful way. If you stick it out to the end, the payoff is worth it.
A story of Death: Paris, near the end of the nineteenth century. A young woman’s corpse is fished out of the river Seine. The body was sent
to the Paris morgue. At the time, it was common practice for morgues to have a large front window where they would display unidentified bodies in the Hopes that some passerby would be able to identify the victim. No such luck. The woman became known as “L’inconnue de la Seine” (The unkown woman of the Seine). Since there were no signs of violence, everyone assumed it was a suicide. People would remark on how serene and beautiful she was in death. Speculation about her identity was rampant; she was a Hungarian music hall artist, she did it because of unrequited love, she was a girl from the country who had an affair with a rich business man who disavowed her after learning she was pregnant…the public ate it up.
At the time, there was also a popular fad of buying and displaying plaster death masks, especially of famous people. There were shops where one could buy all manner of faces and it wouldn’t be uncommon to see a plaster mask of Napoleon hanging in someone’s home. Before disposing of her body, a plaster mask was made of her face, it was reproduced and it sold like crazy all over Germany and France. Anyone who was anyone had a copy.
A story of Life: The year is 1958. Peter Safar, an Austrian physician, has just perfected his revolutionary CPR technique and is looking for a way to manufacture dummies on which people can practice. He teams up with a Norwegian toy maker, Asmund Laerdal, to build it. Laerdal was enthusiastic about making this a success because he just narrowly saved his own son from drowning.
Laerdal gets stuck on how to design the face .In addition to the necessary airways, the dummy needed to be a woman, as men of the time would be reluctant to perform mouth-to-mouth on male dummies.
It needs to be approachable and have a calm presence. One day he visits his parents’ house and on the wall he sees the perfect face “enigmatic…peaceful…beautiful, but not sexy”
It was the face of “L’inconnue de la Seine”.
So this unknown woman, who died under tragic circumstances, becomes the face of the first CPR dummy and she is still used on a majority of them in production today. This woman who felt sad and unloved enough to commit suicide becomes what some call “The most kissed face of all time”. The legacy of this woman who drowned is to, decades after her death, help breathe life into untold near victims of the same fate.
I don’t know what your definition of something beautiful is, but for me, That’s about as close as you can get.