Peter Safar

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. For a detailed biography, Life in the Fast Lane’s medical eponym entry on Peter Safar is one of the most comprehensive resources available.

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. Understanding the full chain of survival that Safar’s work helped establish is essential for anyone seeking to understand modern resuscitation.

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. In 1979 he founded what became the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh, which continues to lead global resuscitation science today. 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. His work exists in a broader continuum of resuscitation history that you can explore on our History of Resuscitation page.

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 full obituary published in The Lancet captures the scale of his loss to the resuscitation community.

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. The story of how we got from Safar’s early experiments to the way cardiac arrest is treated today is explored further on our Before Modern Resuscitation page.