The History of CPR
Today CPR is one of the most accepted and standardized techniques used by emergency responders, and corporate onsite CPR training is offered in almost every major company and business in the United States. Though this has been the case for decades, there was a time when the technique was less accepted by the public and the medical community.
Like other medical breakthroughs, CPR was not discovered all at once. Instead it was slowly studied and refined until it became the standardized life-saving procedure that it is today. From its beginnings in the 1700s, cardiopulmonary resuscitation has continued to evolve as doctors have learned more about the human body, and now it is an extremely effective way to provide emergency medical response to a person suffering from sudden cardiac arrest.
The Beginning
The first mentions of the procedures that would one day become CPR appeared in the middle of 18th century. The Paris Academy of Science began to endorse mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for drowning victims in 1740.
Around the same time, the Society for the Recovery of Drowned Persons was organized. This organizations was founded in Amsterdam in response to the hundreds of citizens who died by drowning in the canals every year. Though not all of the society’s ideas were medically accurate or effective, some of their practices were very similar to how CPR is performed today. These practices would spread to other organizations that provided medical assistance to drowning victims, but it would still be some time before doctors and others studied these techniques in detail.
In the next 150 years, the medical community learned more about the human body and began to study resuscitation. Finally at the end of the nineteenth century two doctors, Dr. Friedrich Maass and Dr. George Crile, independently documented the medical use of chest compressions to resuscitate someone who had drowned. Dr. Maass performed and documented chest compressions, and Dr. Crile had similar success in 1903. From then on, medical organizations adopted chest compressions as a way to revive those who had drowned.
Mouth-to-Mouth CPR
Then in the 1950s, there was another breakthrough in cardiopulmonary resuscitation research. Dr. Peter Safar, Dr. James Elam, and Dr. Archer Gordon were able to prove that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation could provide adequate oxygen to the body and increase the chance of survival of a drowning victim. In 1956, they developed techniques that made mouth-to-mouth CPR more effective, and soon these practices were adopted by the U.S. military and emergency medical services.
In 1960, the American Heart Association started to teach physicians how to perform CPR. In the next decades, the practice became more and more accepted. The first large scale CPR training occurred in Seattle, Washington in 1972. Leonard Cobb led the training program called “Medic 2” which trained more than 100,000 people in the program’s first two years.
CPR in Businesses
Businesses also started providing corporate onsite CPR training, so employees could perform the technique during an emergency, and this became more and more common. Corporate onsite CPR training is now found in many of the world’s largest corporations and businesses. Not only does it help make offices safer, but it’s also a great team-building and leadership opportunity for organizations.
If you are interested in corporate onsite CPR training, there are many ways that you can provide training on a flexible schedule and give participants the chance to get certified in CPR. Our corporate onsite CPR training programs are designed to make CPR approachable and easy to learn, so that your staff will be able to use these techniques to save the lives of coworkers, family members, and anyone else who needs help.
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