The History of CPR: How a 60-Year-Old Technique Has Saved Millions of Lives

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Every year, more than 350,000 people in the United States suffer a cardiac arrest outside of a hospital. For most of them, survival comes down to one thing: whether someone nearby knows CPR and is willing to start pushing on their chest before the ambulance arrives. According to the American Heart Association, immediate CPR can double or even triple a person's chance of survival.

It's easy to think of CPR as something that has always existed. In reality, the technique we teach in our classes today is barely more than 60 years old, and it took nearly three centuries of experiments, accidents, and stubborn researchers to get here.

The Early Days: Breaths, Bellows, and Barrels

The first well-documented rescue breath dates back to 1732, when Scottish surgeon William Tossach revived a coal miner who had collapsed in a mine shaft in Alloa, Scotland, by breathing into his mouth. In 1740, the Paris Academy of Sciences officially recommended mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for drowning victims, and in 1774 a group of Londoners founded the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned, later known as the Royal Humane Society.

For the next century and a half, though, rescuers tried just about everything: rolling victims over barrels, bouncing them on horseback, pumping their arms up and down, and blowing air in with fireplace bellows. Most of these methods did very little. The missing piece was circulation: getting blood, not just air, moving through the body.

Discovering the Power of Chest Compressions

Scientists began to understand the role of the heart in the late 1800s. In 1878, Rudolph Boehm showed that external compressions on the chest could keep blood circulating in animals, and in 1891 Dr. Friedrich Maass became the first to advocate chest compressions in humans. Dr. George Crile reported a successful closed-chest heart massage on a human patient in 1903.

Even so, the idea faded from use for decades. It wasn't until the 1950s that a team at Johns Hopkins University, led by electrical engineer William Kouwenhoven, made the breakthrough that changed everything. While studying defibrillation in dogs, the team noticed that firmly pressing on the chest pushed blood through the body and kept the animals alive until the heart could be shocked back into rhythm.

1960: CPR Is Born

Meanwhile, two anesthesiologists, Dr. James Elam and Dr. Peter Safar, were proving that a rescuer's exhaled breath contains enough oxygen to keep another person alive. In 1956 they demonstrated that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was an effective lifesaving method, and the U.S. military adopted it the following year.

In 1960, Kouwenhoven, Safar, and Dr. James Jude combined the two ideas, rescue breathing plus chest compressions, into the technique we now call cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR. That same year, the Resusci Anne training manikin was introduced, giving people a realistic way to practice. In 1963, the American Heart Association formally endorsed CPR.

How CPR Has Changed Over the Years

CPR has never stood still. As researchers have studied what actually saves lives, the guidelines have evolved:

1966: The first standardized CPR training and performance guidelines were established.
1972: Seattle launched Medic II, the world's first mass citizen CPR training program, proving that ordinary people could learn and perform CPR.
1981: 911 dispatchers began coaching callers through CPR over the phone.
1990: Public access defibrillation programs began putting AEDs in public places and training non-medical people to use them.
2005: The AHA simplified the compression-to-breath ratio to 30:2 and emphasized more compressions with fewer interruptions.
2008: The AHA introduced Hands-Only CPR for bystanders who see a teen or adult suddenly collapse.
2010: The sequence changed from A-B-C (airway, breathing, compressions) to C-A-B, putting chest compressions first.

Today's guidelines focus on high-quality compressions: pushing hard and fast in the center of the chest, at least 2 inches deep for an adult, at a rate of 100 to 120 compressions per minute, and allowing the chest to fully recoil between each push.

Millions of Lives, One Pair of Hands at a Time

When the heart stops, every minute without CPR or defibrillation lowers the chance of survival. Brain damage can begin within a few minutes. Most cardiac arrests happen at home, at work, or in public places, which means the first person on the scene is almost always a family member, coworker, or stranger, not a paramedic.

That's why the simplification of CPR over the decades matters so much. By making the technique easier to learn and easier to remember, researchers have put lifesaving skills in the hands of millions of everyday people. Communities with strong bystander CPR rates and accessible AEDs consistently see more people survive cardiac arrest and go home to their families.

Learn CPR With CMR CPR

Nearly 300 years of history has led to a simple truth: the best lifesaving tool is a trained bystander who's ready to act. CMR CPR offers American Heart Association CPR, AED, and First Aid training for groups of ten or more, right at your location. Whether you're training a workplace, school staff, a church group, or a sports team, we'll bring the class to you.