Drowning in the 19th century...

[denorios]

How much would people have known about drowning and how to revive someone in the latter half of the 19th century? I'm writing a story set in the Old West and my character is dragged from the river after someone tries to drown him. Would people have known to check for breathing and pulse

Comments

[oroburos69]

You may wish to be historically inaccurate here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_smoke_enema

Of course, not exactly the right time period, but pretty close, and if you don't have a doctor on hand, it's plausible that someone would come up with that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_drowning

Is a pretty cool article. If he gets dragged out pretty fast, then he might be okay without any help at all (potentially).

[majolika]

[okaasan59]

Check for breathing and pulse, yes. CPR, no.

My guess is that they would have tried what used to be the practice for choking in my grandmother's time - turn the victim upside down and pound on their back.

[lied_ohne_worte]

I remember reading about rolling people over a barrel - I think that was mostly to get them to expel water. Googling "drowning 'rolling over a barrel'" gives a number of promising-looking sites.

Of course pulse and breathing were recognised as important then; they are really very obvious signs of checking whether someone is alive and likely to stay so, and medicine in the 19th century wasn't that clueless.

[darlingfox]

Googling "history of CPR" gives several sites that could be useful.

Just choose something you could believably use in your story (if no one who's there has a horse, they obviously couldn't use the trotting horse method etc.). While the old methods might have been weird and sometimes almost useless, occasionally they did work. Your character could be that one survivor.