Resusci Anne

The secret history behind the world's most popular CPR training tool.

Anyone who has done first aid training will probably have met Resusci Anne, the standard training tool for CPR. She takes the form of the head and limbless torso of a young woman, boyish in figure, with an impassive, serene face moulded from soft plastic. According to the manufacturers, her face was taken from the death mask of an unidentified woman whose body was fished from the Seine many years before.

A rumour persists, however, that the face was modelled on that of the daughter of one of the developers of the doll, a daughter who had drowned in a local river. If this is more than just a legend, though, why would he have done such a thing?

It's simple. The doll was created to bring the man's daughter back from the dead. Every time someone practices the kiss of life or a heart massage on Anne, they pass a bit of their own life over to her. It didn't take long to work. Anne is back.

The problem is that no one foresaw the immense popularity of the doll. She has been in use across the world for over thirty-five years, gathering and focusing all that life.

In the beginning, everything was fine. Anne made her way home from the river and, once the shock of her resurrection had worn off, the developer had his daughter back in his life, as joyful and vital as ever. Then, a couple of years later, she turned up again at his doorstep, pale and dripping with river water. And, less than a year after that, again.

As the use of the doll increased, Anne arrived more frequently, cold and confused, until there was at least one turning up every week. It didn't take long to run out of room in the earth-floored cellar and between the trees in the orchard. And still Anne came home.

There was a new product released recently, by an apparently unrelated company. If you're interested in guns, and the people in your local shooting range have a taste for the unusual, you may have seen it already. The face on the target is only roughly detailed, but identifiable if you know what to look for. They're going to have to sell a lot of them, though. Anne is still coming home -- cold, wet and wanting her father.