Peter Safar

Peter Safar was an Austrian anaesthesiologist of Czech Jewish descent, born in Vienna into a well-known Jewish medical family: his father was an ophthalmologist and his mother a paediatrician, and both were dismissed from their posts under the Nuremberg Laws after the Anschluss, which also barred him from enrolling at university. He survived the war, qualified in Vienna in 1948 and emigrated to the United States, where between 1957 and 1960 he assembled what the world now calls CPR — the head-tilt and chin-lift that opens the airway, mouth-to-mouth breathing, which he proved sufficient by experiments on paralysed volunteers, and chest compressions, joined into the single A-B-C drill of his 1957 book.

He had the Norwegian doll-maker Åsmund Lærdal build the training manikin Resusci Anne so that laypeople could learn it. He also opened the first intensive-care unit in the United States, in 1958, founded the first modern ambulance service, and was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize.