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Take it away, Kevin. Peter Safer was born in 1920s Vienna to two physicians. They met while they were dissecting bodies in medical school. He grew up with this very bohemian existence. And then in March of 1938, he and his father are in the Vienna Opera House.
They come out afterward. You know, he's young. He's a teenager. He's feeling very excited about the world. And what he finds when he steps out of the opera house is complete madness or people waving swastika flags in the street and chanting Jews out. That's where he learns that the Nazis have swept across the Austrian border.
And within a couple of days, they've occupied Vienna, completely changing his life. Because Safer was a child of physicians, he's protected from conscription into the German army by a group of doctors, a group of friendly doctors who routinely fake medical ailments for Safer. Kids in Austria growing up at that time are all going to be sent to the Eastern Front, which is, you know, one of history's great meat grinders. About 80 percent of the kids, both above, below and in his high school class, were all killed in the Eastern Front. So had he been conscripted into the army and sent east to fight Russia, chances are he would have been killed.
And his family, friends knew this. And so they they faked a number of illnesses in order to keep him in the hospital and out of reach of the army. Eventually, this goes on for so long that the army is, you know, German army is essentially tricked into believing that this kid just has far too many ailments and he's released from any threat of conscription. He's already in the hospital, so he begins working as an orderly. And when the war is over in 1945, he finishes his medical schooling.
But he now has a tremendous sense of guilt. So many of the kids he grew up with are dead. And they're dead because they didn't have powerful people to protect them.
And Safford's alive. And he's alive because his parents had enough connections to keep him alive. He swears to himself that, look, if all those people died and I lived, then it had to be for a reason.
And I will find that reason and I will work tirelessly throughout my entire life to make good on this incredible miracle that's been bestowed upon me. 1949, he gets an offer to go and study at Yale, leaves Vienna, moves to the U.S. He encounters anesthesiology, which at that point is brand new. So brand new, in fact, that where he comes from in Vienna, if you're going to have a surgery, what the doctor would do was soak a rag in ether and place it over your mouth, essentially hold it there until you stop kicking. And once you stop resisting, then they remove the rag, begin surgery, and if you start to wake up, they just put the rag back over you. That's anesthesiology where Safford lives. When he comes to the U.S., he sees drugs given by IV, drugs given by endotracheal tube, which is, you know, the tube placed down your throat.
And it's calibrated and it's precise and it's all brand new and exciting. So he enters into anesthesiology. In 1956, he comes across this study.
It was written by a Texas doctor named James Elam. What the study says is that there's enough oxygen in the air you breathe out to keep somebody else alive. Now, this is important for Safford for two reasons. One is that at that point, conventional wisdom says that if you breathe into somebody's mouth, you're going to kill them with all of your gases. You're going to breathe out carbon dioxide and it's just going to poison their blood and it's going to kill them. Whereas Elam is saying, no, no, there's going to be enough oxygen in this in this air to keep someone alive. And the second is that Safford has witnessed at this point what we consider to be rescue breathing.
And he knows instantly that it doesn't work. In 1956, if somebody stopped breathing and you're a medical professional, what you're trained to do was roll a person over onto their face, crouch by their shoulders and then press down on their shoulder blades. Then you would lift up on their arms and then you would press down on their shoulder blades again. And the idea here is that you're sort of flexing and bowing their body in such a way that their lungs are going to move almost by accident and thereby sort of let some air squeak into their lungs.
I mean, this process really is like what you would do to a Thanksgiving turkey. Safford looks at this and he knows there's no way that any oxygen is actually getting into anybody's lungs this way. But he doesn't know what to do about it because there's no other method that somebody on the street could use. Once you get into the hospital, the doctor can deliver oxygen through all sorts of advanced ways. But someone at home, someone who witnesses another person drop and stop breathing, they have nothing that they can do. Safford's been mulling this over and he comes across Helium study, which the world has ignored for two years.
Safford instantly recognizes this is it. This can be the key to saving lives on the street. What he wants to do is set up a series of tests.
And what the test will prove is that not only does the back press arm lift method not work, but that rescue breathing, the art of breathing into somebody else's mouth, deliver your oxygen into them will keep them alive. So he recruits a number of volunteers. He goes around to try to get funding. And every person he goes to essentially says, no, they don't want to give him any money. They don't believe in what he's got to say. And more importantly, they don't believe in him as a 33 year old doctor who's got a young family and is trying to build a career. This is probably the point at which he would let go and say, OK, well, I tried.
The world's not going to listen to me. But again, Safford is one of very few people who was saved during an incredibly violent time. And he's desperate to make good on being kept alive. And so he decides, forget it.
I'll just go ahead and do this on my own. So even though he's never run a test before, even though he doesn't have any place to do the test, he doesn't have any money to do the test and he doesn't have any way to prove that what he says is in any way valid, he goes ahead and he schedules the test. There's two things that Safford needs to prove here. The first is that arm lift back press doesn't work. The second is that mouth to mouth does work.
The obvious thing to do would be to simply bring in a bunch of professionals and have them do both arm lift back press and mouth to mouth and just see what works and what doesn't work. But Safford doesn't simply want to prove that you could do mouth to mouth. This is a technique that he believes will save lives, not just a few lives, but lives all over the world. And he thinks the only way for that to happen is for ordinary people to be actually the ones doing this job, that when somebody drops, that the person sitting next to them can immediately begin saving their lives because he recognizes that the time it's going to take you to get to the hospital is way too long, certainly for your brain to be saved if you haven't been getting any oxygen. So what good is just teaching a bunch of doctors this technique?
He needs to teach lay people this technique. And you've been listening to Kevin Hazard tell the story of how CPR came to be and the story of Peter Safford and how he was saved from certain death by being helped and aided by doctors to keep him out of conscription and out of the Nazi army. And my goodness, what a day that must have been in March of 1938, stepping out of the Vienna Opera House, only to see Nazis swarming the streets and occupying this once great and powerful city, Vienna and the entire country. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Peter Safford and how this thing called CPR that saves countless lives each and every day, the story of CPR and the story of Peter Safford continues here on our American story. What are you looking for in a new smart TV, 4K picture quality, high quality and immersive sound, a sleek design? All of those are givens, but only the new Roku Pro Series has all of those and the Roku Streaming Experience, an award winning OS. Get fast, easy access to all your apps like iHeart, where you can stream all your favorite music, radio and podcasts all day and regular all inclusive trips to Roku City.
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The pro volleyball federation All-Star match on February 22nd at one thirty p.m. Be there. And we return to our American stories and the story of Peter Safer and the invention of CPR. Here again is Kevin Hazard, author of American Sirens. You'll also hear from Safer himself, Austrian accent and all.
Let's return to the story. What he wants to do with this test, he wants to recruit professionals to do the old method, the method that is accepted, but that he's convinced is absolutely nothing. And he's going to recruit a bunch of complete unknowns, children, some cases as young as 10.
He gets secretaries, he gets accountants, he just ordinary people, people off the street. And he's going to give them a 10 second crash course in how to do mouth to mouth and then let them go and allow them to do it. He goes to doctors, he goes to medical students, he goes to nurses and he says, OK, here's what I want you to do.
I'm going to pay you one hundred and fifty dollars and you're going to come. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to sedate you and then I'm going to paralyze you once you're unconscious. And then over the course of several hours, while you are unconscious and unable to breathe, I'm going to run this experiment on you. We record someone doing the arm lift chest press on you and we're going to see that that doesn't work. And when it doesn't work, they're going to back up and I'm going to bring in a secretary.
I'm going to bring in an 11 year old boy scout and then I'm going to teach them how to do mouth to mouth. And they're going to keep you alive for the remainder of this study. And this isn't going to happen just once. It's going to happen forty nine different times.
This sounds literally like the world's worst sales pitch. Somebody saying to you, hey, I'm going to sedate you, paralyze you, use a method that we both know doesn't work to nearly kill you. And then I'm going to bring in someone who has no idea what they're doing and they're going to keep you alive.
And we're going to do this to you multiple times. This is a guy who's very young, who's totally inexperienced, who's trying to prove something that the world does not believe is true. And he gets not one or 10 or 20, but he gets 32 different people to agree to this. And these are not desperate people. Again, these are medical students or doctors and nurses. These are professionals, which shows you two things. One, Safra is an incredibly persuasive person. And two, they know he's right and they know that what he's doing is going to save millions of lives. So they volunteer.
The first test was on Saturday, December 8th, 1956. At that point in time, Baltimore City Hospital was closed on the weekend. Safra knew that every Saturday and every Sunday he'd have an open O.R. He would bring in a number of subjects, maybe half a dozen or so, as many would fit in the room. And then around the side, he would have the chief of the Baltimore Fire Department who would come in. That's who's going to do the established method, this professional who's doing the back press arm lift. And then around the edges of the room is where he has his lay people who are going to do the experimental method in which Safra wants to be able to show the world, because he knows that there's only so much he can do as one person. He's not going to be able to go everywhere and talk to everybody. He needs a way to deliver this incredible piece of life-saving technology to the whole world.
So he wants to record this movie. The experimental study you are about to see, during which we compared various methods of artificial respiration by anesthetizing and curatizing these subjects in order to simulate limp asphyxia victims by having untrained lay personnel perform some of these methods. He brings these people in, lays them on the floor, starts an IV. First thing he does is he gives a sedative, which knocks them out. Now the subject is being rendered unconscious by the intravenous injection of one milligram of scopolamine. And once they're unconscious, he gives them a paralytic, which stops them from breathing. All muscles, including the respiratory muscles, will remain paralyzed for the next three hours. And then he begins mechanically ventilating them, which means he gets a ventilator bag and he's just breathing for them. And he calls over the firefighter. Each of these people is on very carefully calibrated machines to measure the depth of the rise and fall of the chest with each different maneuver and also the oxygen level in their blood.
The pneumograph shows tidal volumes of 2,000 milliliters and more. Saffir begins his test and he sedates, paralyzes his patients. So at this point, they're literally in respiratory arrest. They are not breathing. He begins mechanically ventilating them with a bag just to keep oxygen in while he's getting everybody ready.
And he brings over the fire tooth. This is a man with decades of experience who's been doing this many, many times. He sits down and he begins doing the back press arm lift on the patients. Now we will study the currently taught back pressure arm lift method. And for the first time, the effectiveness of this procedure is actually being measured. First, we study the chest pressure method with the subject in the supine position.
Now the rescue is performing the back pressure arm lift method as it was taught since 1951. Saffir has this wonderful eye for drama. And he knows that if people are going to be watching this video, that he's got to be able to draw them in. And so when he's doing the back press arm lift method with the fire chief on the video, he allows the man's oxygen level to drop, not to the low 90s or the upper 80s, but all the way down to 80, just continues to fall and fall and fall. This is a point at which any emergency room in the country would be springing to action to save a patient.
And Saffir has brought this person right down to the brink. No air reaches the alveoli, but there is almost zero exchange and air is squeezed out of the lungs. Forget that this isn't helping people. This mechanical procedure is actually actively killing them. So they measure oxygen levels swinging down from 98 to 96 to 91 to 90 to 89.
Clearly it isn't working, so they pull them away. Back pressure arm lift and chest pressure arm lift methods of artificial respiration proved unreliable. They roll the patient back over and then Saffir waves and this 10-year-old child walks forward. This boy scout will perform mouth-to-airway breathing.
He weighs 100 pounds. Now, on the ground before him is a full grown man, about 200 pounds, and in comes a boy scout. He kneels down at the patient's head and Saffir says, okay, here's what you're going to do. He gives him a 10-second crash course on rescue breathing. Tilt the head, pinch the nose, pull back on the jaw, put your mouth on, breathe as hard as you can. The child leans forward, does everything Saffir says, breathes out, nothing happens. Chest doesn't rise, nothing's going on.
Clearly oxygen was not delivered. So the kid sort of repositions the head, leans down. He has some difficulty but corrects himself. On video, leans down and immediately brings this patient back. This video is incredibly dramatic and it's incredibly effective. Everyone who sees it is blown away. Everybody's eyes shoot to the monitors and the oxygen level goes from 87, 89, to 92, to 95.
I can't believe it just floats right back up, literally recording this. He was able to adequately ventilate subjects weighing up to 210 pounds. So over the next few hours, they continue this. They continue sedating patients and they continue bringing in the fire chief so that he can do the antiquated method, which of course squeezes oxygen out of everybody's lungs. And then he brings forth a house painter, he brings forth a mechanic, he brings forth a secretary. And time and time again, they bring these people using mouth-to-mouth right back to healthy levels. With mouth-to-mouth breathing, re-oxygenation can be accomplished within seconds by deep inflations through an open airway. In October of 1957, Safford travels to Los Angeles and he is delivering his results to a conference of medical professionals from around the world.
Instantly, people recognize it for what it is, which is incredible life-saving innovation. He begins traveling the world. He goes to every continent. He goes to every country. He's showing his video to any place he can't go.
He's delivering lectures to anybody who will listen. And almost instantly, the entire world just takes this thing and they run with it. The Red Cross delivers the video, they make copies of it, and they deliver it to the International Red Cross, which disperses it everywhere. While he's traveling around the world teaching rescue breathing, he pairs it with chest compressions. So his original innovation of rescue breathing now suddenly becomes CPR, as we know today.
So for the first time in human history, you could lean down next to your neighbor and not only breathe for them, but also pump their heart. All this is done by a 33-year-old physician that the world did not believe in when he first set out. And a special thanks to Kevin Hazard for sharing Peter Safer's story with us. Safer, by the way, would go on to invent the modern-day paramedic system in the 1960s. You can read all about that in Kevin Hazard's terrific book, American Sirens. Thanks also to our contributor and producer, Jon Elfner, for editing and producing this story. And my goodness, imagine these comparisons. Who are the people who volunteered, and what a salesman Safer was to get them to do it?
The story of Peter Safer, the story of CPR, here on Our American Stories. Roku has what you need to make your college home away from home feel more like your own. Make your dorm the place to be with Roku TV, or bring a Roku streaming stick to easily access all your favorite free and premium content like iHeartRadio. Stream your favorite playlist with the Roku vibe-setting smart light strips to sync your music to millions of colors and make your dorm feel more like you. Make your dorm the place to be with Roku TV's streaming players and smart lights.
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