Peter Safar (1924–2003) is widely regarded as the father of modern CPR. A Czech-born anaesthesiologist who fled to the United States after the Second World War, Safar combined extraordinary scientific rigour with a deeply humanitarian vision of medicine. His work did not simply advance resuscitation — it made the idea of training ordinary people to save lives not just possible but routine.
The ABC of Resuscitation
Working with James Elam from 1956, Safar conducted a landmark series of experiments demonstrating that mouth-to-mouth breathing could maintain adequate oxygen levels in a non-breathing person — and crucially, that untrained members of the public could do it effectively. He combined the Airway, Breathing, and Circulation components into a single teachable system, publishing ABC of Resuscitation in 1957. The American Heart Association adopted this framework in 1973 as the standard for public CPR training — a standard that, in evolved form, remains in use today.
Safar also persuaded Norwegian toy manufacturer Åsmund Laërdal to create the Resusci Anne mannequin — the training dummy used to teach CPR to millions of people worldwide, named after a girl whose face was taken from a famous death mask. It is estimated that Resusci Anne has been used to train more people than any other medical training device in history.
Intensive Care and Beyond
Safar’s contributions extended well beyond CPR. He founded the world’s first multidisciplinary intensive care unit in Baltimore in 1958, establishing the model of continuous, specialist post-resuscitation care that underpins modern ICUs. He was also a pioneer in the study of suspended animation — research into cooling the body after cardiac arrest to protect the brain — which directly informed the therapeutic hypothermia protocols that became standard post-resuscitation care in the 2000s.
He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine on multiple occasions. He never received it — an omission widely considered one of the Nobel Committee’s more puzzling decisions.
A Personal Mission
Safar’s commitment to resuscitation was not purely academic. His daughter Elizabeth suffered a severe asthma attack in 1966 and died after a prolonged resuscitation attempt — an event that deepened his conviction that better post-resuscitation brain protection was possible and necessary. Much of his later research was driven by that loss.
For cardiac arrest survivors, Safar’s legacy is intimate. The CPR that kept your brain alive, the ICU that monitored your recovery, the cooling protocols that may have protected your neurological function — all of it traces, in part, back to one man who believed that death after cardiac arrest was not inevitable, and spent his life proving it.