The face of a mannequin for resuscitation training turned out to be a copy of the face of a 19th century drowned woman

You will be amazed to find out how many ordinary things have funny, strange and even creepy stories of occurrence. Take, for example, a stethoscope. This element of medical equipment, which became part of the medical image, appeared under very comic circumstances. In the 19th century, doctors listened to the patient’s heart and breathing, simply leaning his ear against his chest. Once, a doctor named Rene Laannek was so embarrassed by the need to listen to the patient’s heartbeat, being so intimate with her that he rolled a sheet of paper, put it on the woman’s chest and gave birth to a new medical invention.

But back to the stories, not so sweet, but no less impressive. L'Inconnue de la Seine is a special object in the history of art. This is a cast of the face, made after death and provoking very contradictory and ambiguous feelings, because it combines the things that are diametrically opposite at first glance - a portrait of a dead man and a feeling of absolute peace.

Despite the fact that the details of the origin of this mask are shrouded in darkness, many believe that an unidentified girl, whose face conquered thousands of people and a little later saved the lives of tens of thousands, most likely committed suicide. According to legend, her body was removed from the Seine in the late 1880s. No signs of violence were found on it, so forensic experts called the tragedy a suicide. After assessing the condition of the skin and some features of the body, experts considered that the girl was no more than 16 years old. The pathologist in the morgue of Paris was so subdued by her beauty that he made a wax death mask.

The image of the drowned woman confidently went down in history and served as inspiration for many works of art, novels and songs. Some experts and scientists even say that the “Stranger from the Seine” was a kind of fashionable icon for the fair sex of that era. Strange as it may sound, they tried to be like her.

Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdahl, authors of the famous dummy for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, chose the death mask of a drowned woman from the Seine as a face for their creation. As this dummy is used today in many resuscitation courses, L'Inconnue de la Seine has been recognized as the most kissed person of all time.