Who is this?

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AUGUSTAMEDICALEXAMiNER JUNE 21, 2019

#93 IN A SERIES

Who is this?

For the first time in 93 installments, the answer to Who is this? is: we have no idea. No one does.

This beautiful, enigmatic and anonymous face does have a name, though: L’Inconnue de la Seine, the Unknown Woman of the Seine. Hers are said to be the most-kissed lips in world history. And possibly the most life-saving lips of all time.

Her story dates back to the late 1880s, when her lifeless body was pulled from the River Seine not far from the Louvre. As the story goes, a pathologist at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he made a plaster cast of her face. (Another possibility: death masks of unidentified people were often made in past eras so that burial could take place while attempts to identify the victim could continue using the mask.) Another copy of the mask was made, and then a dozen, and then hundreds. She appeared in poems and short stories by writers from Albert Camus to Vladimir Nabokov. Her smile was compared to Mona Lisa’s. Eventually the serene and beautiful face of L’Inconnue de la Seine was found in museums, cafés and private homes around the world.

One of those replicas was owned by a Norwegian toy maker named Asmund Laerdal. He didn’t know it at the time — the mid 1950s — but across the Atlantic Peter Safar, an Austrian doctor living in America, had discovered a means to keep victims of heart attacks alive long enough to get them to a hospital. The procedure came to be known as CPR, short for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Safar demonstrated that chest compressions combined with mouth-to-mouth breathing could keep oxygenated blood circulating, cutting the risk of brain damage and death.

He thought the procedure was so simple that anyone could do it, not just trained medical personnel — if they had a way to learn and practice. Remembering the rubber cars and trucks made by the Laerdal company he played with as a child (they were marketed as “furniture friendly”), Dr. Safar convinced Laerdal, also a doll maker, to build a mannequin that would be suitable for CPR training purposes.

Working with Safar and another doctor, Safar’s colleague James Elam, Asmund Laerdal developed what many people today call Rescue Annie or ResusciAnnie. Asmund Laerdal modeled Annie’s face after one he had gazed upon many times: “The Unknown Woman of the Seine.” Still in production today, Annie’s lips are said to be the most-kissed lips of all time, and the pair that have saved more lives than any other. If you ever took a CPR class, you’ve kissed them too.

The mannequin marked Laerdal’s entry into the medical field, and today the company remains a leader in building simulated and interactive medical training devices for practicing CPR, intubating patients, inserting IVs, and more.

L’Inconnue de la Seine, thought to have been around 16 at the time of her death, was never identified. Considering the countless lives she has saved, the irony is that because her body showed no signs of violence or trauma, her death was believed to be a suicide.

ON THE ROAD TO BETTER HEALTH

A PATIENT’S PERSPECTIVE

Editor’s note: Augusta writer Marcia Ribble, Ph.D., is a retired English and creative writing professor who offers her unique perspective as a patient. Contact her at marciaribble@hotmail.com

by Marcia Ribble

My dog KC is out in the backyard on critter duty. As-long-as she is quiet, we all know the neighborhood is safe. One night she barked very loudly for more than her standard minute or two for a traveling critter, and the next day my neighbor discovered items missing from his backyard. He told me about it later and said he won’t ignore KC’s barking anymore, because her critter warnings include warning us about the two-legged kind of varmint.

We all count on warnings to protect us from harm, whether from human or animal predators. The trick for medical folks is to get us to pay attention to those warnings, something we are often unwilling or unable, to do. Two of the most frequent warnings we get from our doctors are to avoid excessive weight and stop smoking cigarettes. Neither warning is able in many cases to curb eating and smoking habits deeply ingrained from childhood, often because there are no direct and immediate cause and affect consequences. This is not because we are unwilling to learn, just that when we are learning we need feedback to know that what we are changing is working.

We know there are physical changes that come from losing weight. Those are consequences we can use to spur us to change old eating habits, but we need to be mindful of those changes, in the same way that patients undergoing chemotherapy are mindful of changes that help them cope with hair loss, like improving biochemical values that show cancer cells and tumor sizes decreasing. What can we do besides watching us becoming smaller and our clothes becoming too large for us?

One trick is to focus on what is changing in our ability to live a more fulfilling life. A recovering alcoholic once told me that he was slowly noticing how many activities

Sugar causes cavities

Strictly speaking, that is a false statement, a myth. Surprised? According to doctors at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, sugar itself doesn’t harm teeth. Sugar occurs naturally in most foods and is used by the body for energy.

However, bacteria loves sugar, feeding on it from the foods we

eat. The more sugary foods and sweetened drinks we consume, the more oral bacteria flourishes.

But bacteria isn’t the direct culprit either, say the UAMS dental experts.

Instead, the abundant bacteria fed by sugar produces acid, and that is what breaks down the enamel in teeth, leading to cavities.

The key to oral health is

had been displaced by drinking, recovering from a drunken episode, and feeling guilty about drinking. He noted how many parties he had missed, how he had stopped fishing which he enjoyed, how his relationships had suffered from his too frequent absences. Losing the ability to participate in activities is very gradual, often occurring over years, so what did we used to enjoy doing? Make a list. Use that as a check point to have solid functional proof of a progression toward better health overall. Doing what we used to enjoy has a built in gift of feeling more alive while simultaneously increasing our activity levels. An additional benefit is a decreased likelihood of regaining lost weight!

The same kind of process can be applied to quitting smoking. I quit smoking over fifty years ago and I still remember how challenging it was. Smoking doesn’t kill us immediately, so like losing weight, it can be difficult to notice any immediate benefits from quitting. My mom died from smoking and it took fifty years of smoking to kill her, so her attempts to quit smoking were largely marked by the discomfort she felt when she took her annual six weeks off cigarettes for Lent. She listed being angry all the time, gaining weight, and having constipation as the negative side effects of quitting. Wow! That can really make you want to quit!

My motivation for quitting was different. I wanted to lessen the chance that my children would follow my example and smoke. My reason was not connected to how I was feeling, an end goal to help me stay smokefree despite some discomfort. My kids’ dad didn’t quit smoking. His heart attack in 2004 was fatal. Despite being overweight most of my adult life, I am still alive 15 years later. I know it’s time to lose more weight, because even at 75 I will reap benefits from doing so. I lost a hundred pounds in 2014 and I am ready to go after the remaining weight while I can still enjoy the benefits! +

WHICH WILL IT BE?

bacteria prevention through regular brushing and flossing, leading to less acid, which results in fewer cavities.

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