A column about curious stories from the world of science and technology. Today — the story of a face that hangs in every Red Cross classroom on the planet: hundreds of millions of people have pressed their lips to it, and the scene “Annie, are you OK?” is acted out on it, by a modest estimate, a million times a day. This face has no name, no death certificate, and no proof that its owner ever drowned at all. But it is guaranteed to survive until the end of civilization — as the mannequin on which humanity practices bringing people back to life. The trigger for this investigation was a random evening film — Jaume Balagueró’s 2005 horror Fragile, where the ghost of a “mechanical girl” roams the locked third floor of a children’s hospital, and a glass cabinet holding that very training mannequin stands in the frame. The film left the question open, and it turned out to be far more interesting than the plot: who is this girl with her closed eyes and half-smile, and how did a face from a Victorian bestiary become a medical standard?
Let’s begin with the place where this face still physically lives. Arcueil, a suburb of Paris; the Lorenzi workshop — the last old-school family business casting plaster molds, carrying on since the 1870s. Downstairs, they cast busts and figurines, just as they did a century and a half ago; up a dusty staircase lies an attic hung with life and death masks of famous people: Napoleon, Robespierre, Verlaine, Hugo, two faces of Beethoven — one alive, stubborn, the other yellowed, sunken, posthumous.
And here is the detail that gave BBC journalist Jeremy Grange the creeps in 2013: the workshop’s bestseller is neither Napoleon nor Beethoven. It is the mask of a young woman with lowered eyelids and the hint of a smile, the only one in the entire collection without a label. She is known simply as L’Inconnue — “The Unknown Woman of the Seine.”
The canonical story, repeated by every encyclopedia, goes like this: in the late 1880s, the body of a young girl was pulled from the Seine near the Louvre quay. There were no signs of violence — suicide, they concluded. The body went unidentified at the morgue, and an attendant, according to legend, could not resist: he made a plaster cast of her face, because that was “customary in such cases,” and because he had never seen a face like this before. The cast then began to multiply, and by the start of the twentieth century copies of the mask had become a fashionable, if grim, feature of bohemian interiors: it hung in artists’ studios and bookshops; poems were written about it.
The mechanics of its reproduction are unsettling. The original mold, by the most widespread account, was taken to Germany and lost in the bombings; new copies were cast from photographic negatives — and every fresh casting looked “too alive” for a drowned girl, while the unnatural smoothness of the skin only confirmed its authenticity to later generations. A spiral of self-verification, perfectly familiar to anyone who watches folklore turn into a “source.”
Archivists date the first literary echo to 1899–1900: Richard Le Gallienne’s novella “The Worshipper of the Image,” in which a copy of the mask turns out to be sentient evil and destroys a young poet. There was more to come — but first we need to sort out the main question.
The question is simple: does this mask look like a drowned girl? The answer from people who professionally pull bodies from the Paris Seine is no.
Pascal Jacquin, chief of the river brigade, put it this way to the BBC from the wheelhouse of a boat moored beside brigade headquarters near the Austerlitz Bridge: “It’s surprising to see such a peaceful face. All the people we pull out of the water — drowned people, suicides — never look like that. They are swollen, and it’s not a pretty sight.” Even suicides struggle for life in the final moment, and their faces betray that struggle; water, incidentally, speeds decomposition rather than preserving beauty.
The owner of the Lorenzi workshop goes further: “To me, it does not look like the face of a dead person. It is almost impossible to hold a smile while having a mask made — I think she was a professional, very good model.” In his version, there is no morgue at all: there is a sculptor, plaster, and a living girl with lungs of iron.
There is a third version, the dullest and therefore the most plausible. It traces the mask back to the painter Jules Joseph Lefebvre: it was made from a young model who died of tuberculosis some fifteen years before the “pull from the Seine” — and, as luck would have it, the original mold did not survive. Curator and researcher Claire Forestier adds that, judging by the elasticity of her skin, the girl on the mask was no older than sixteen.
Now look at the chronology through an auditor’s eyes. The canonical “recovery” comes in the late 1880s. The first documentary trace of the mask as a cultural object is 1900. Between them: zero primary documents. No morgue report, no entry for an unidentified body, no mold. Only the memories of “people in the know,” and a mass-produced copy against which those memories can conveniently be checked. The death mask as a medium was born for an age before photography — and here it played photographer in reverse: a pre-photographic technology became, for the first time, the mass image of a face no one could verify.
Let us move to Norway, 1955. Åsmund Laerdal, a Norwegian maker of soft plastic dolls and toy cars, pulls his own son Tore from the water — lifeless, blue. He clears the boy’s airways, and the child comes back. A few years later doctors will come knocking with an offer he cannot refuse — and he will carry the memory of that morning straight into the project.
By the mid-fifties, Laerdal had an unexpected qualification for a “toymaker”: his company made imitation wounds for Red Cross first-aid courses in Norway and Sweden. Meanwhile, medicine was assembling from separate parts the method later called CPR: external cardiac massage plus mouth-to-mouth ventilation — we covered this in detail in our piece on the birth of resuscitation medicine, so let us only recall that Peter Safar and James Elam closed the loop. The technique worked, but it could not be passed on in words: chest compressions are about depth, rhythm, tempo. You teach that hands-on.
Laerdal was asked to make a training tool. He built a torso, then a full body simulating an unconscious patient, and made two decisions that determined everything.
First: the face would be female. If the mannequin were male, Åsmund reasoned, trainees would be embarrassed to “kiss” his lips, while the key skill was precisely blowing air into them. This raises the question of where a Norwegian toy manufacturer happened to find a face of suitable beauty — and here Laerdal tells a story hovering on the edge of family lore: he had seen L’Inconnue’s mask on the wall of his grandparents’ house many years earlier. The mannequin inherited the name “Anne” from a popular doll the company was already producing.
The second decision was the point after which medical history and corporate mythology give conflicting accounts: the mannequin debuted in September 1960 in Stavanger, at the First International Symposium on Resuscitation, in a hall containing Safar, Elam, Gordon, Ruben, and Frey themselves. Safar and Elam stayed on to work with Laerdal and his team, refining “Annie” for everyday clinical use. Academic literature gives the leading role to Safar; corporate literature to Laerdal. The truth, as always in such cases, is distributed.
The anatomy of the first “Annie” deserves its own paragraph — it was a device assembled by toy technicians out of materials from the company’s own toy production. The ribs were a circular steel spring supporting a sternum plate; the “lung” was a plastic bag; the rest of the body was a rubber bellows that the instructor inflated with a foot pump before every class, then cleaned, deflated, folded, and put back in its box afterward. The pulse at the carotid artery was produced by the instructor squeezing a rubber bulb in one hand. Trainees read the accuracy of their compressions and breaths from the needles of aneroid gauges. Cybernetics powered by a foot pump — but it worked.
Since the 1960s, the counter of trained people has ticked without pause: by 2013, the BBC estimated Annie’s army of graduates at 300 million people. The arithmetic of “kisses of life” over six decades easily leads to a title no one will ever take from her: the most kissed girl in human history. The epithet was coined in a medical symposium announcement, but the statistics seem to support it.
The next generation of mannequins shaped the industry we now call simulation training. The body made of inflatable bellows gave way to foam; pressure sensors lit bulbs on a pedestal housing an electronic metronome; trainees entered their figures onto paper tape — a pseudo-ECG printing depth, pace, and sequence like a receipt. Hygiene got its own line: replaceable lips for every student, and replaceable lungs, which the first users of inflatable bellows could only dream about.
The family expanded through generations: Resusci Baby, an older child mannequin, an African American version, a model for advanced resuscitation with electrodes connected to a real — attenuated — defibrillator shock. In 1995 came Little Anne: a cheap trainer designed for one simple purpose — to reduce the ratio of trainees to each mannequin. And in the 2000s, studies showed that even professionals pressed on the chest badly and out of rhythm, and simulation moved fully into the computer: the ancestor of today’s full-body robotic patients, SimMan, grew out of sensors bolted onto the memory of an unnamed drowned girl.
One revealing detail: almost every trainee in the world begins their training with the protocol’s first phrase. “Annie… Annie… Are you OK?” — the consciousness check in the first stage of CPR: calling out, shaking the shoulders. By the 1970s, that phrase was routine for thousands of EMTs, nurses, firefighters, and police officers — and then it turned out that it had traveled beyond the classroom into the cultural ether. The refrain of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” — “Annie, are you OK?” — was, according to the makers of the documentary Bad 25, born from the resuscitation trainings people around him were taking. The hard-rock energy of an emergency protocol, flashed across MTV.
Back to the face. L’Inconnue’s literary wake is so dense she deserves a separate volume of bibliography. Rilke, in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge from 1910: Malte remembers the mask from the Paris morgue, which “smiled too deceptively, as though it knew something,” and which people kept because they admired it. Maurice Blanchot, in The Space of Literature, wrote that she drowned “at the moment of greatest happiness.” Louis Aragon placed her image in Aurélien, and Man Ray photographed the mask for a new edition of the novel twenty years after the war. In 1934, Reinhold Conrad Muschler’s Die Unbekannte came out — a bestseller about the orphan Madeleine Lavin, adapted for film two years later. Camus compared her smile to the Mona Lisa’s; in Alvarez’s The Savage God — a psychological study of suicide — there are passages on how a whole generation of German girls modeled themselves on her face, until Garbo displaced the ideal.
But the juiciest thing happened to her in our own time — when the legend acquired digital vessels.
Example one, intimate: a guide at the house museum of Liverpool photographer Edward Chambré Hardman told visitors a story about twin sisters born in Liverpool more than a century ago. One ran off to Paris with a wealthy suitor and vanished; the other, walking through the French capital many years later, recognized the face of her missing sister in a mask displayed in the window of a plaster-casters’ workshop — forever young while she herself had grown old. A legend without a single document, but with perfect dramaturgy: the story is born not from an archive, but from the wall on which the face hangs.
Example two, digital. Artist John Goto constructed a topical pseudo-documentary detective story: a postcard from a flea market in Buenos Aires and a circumstantial trail of evidence “irrefutably prove” that L’Inconnue was the Hungarian actress Eva Laszlo, murdered by her jealous lover Louis Aragon. Goto put the construction online, accompanied by an honest disclaimer, and went off to make other projects. A few years later, an ensemble invited to perform at an evening event during a London medical symposium was already staging a play “about the fate of Eva Laszlo, who became the face of the Resusci Anne mannequin,” while blogs and websites cited Eva as fact. Goto admitted that it made him uneasy: “I thought people would take it as a postmodern fiction. I didn’t expect it to be taken seriously.”
Notice the mechanism: both legends grew where there was no archive. The loss of primary documents is not a hole in history but a vacuum pump: it sucks in any plot, because there is nothing to disprove.
One final question remains: why did this very face, stripped of a name, turn out to be ideal for a medical trainer?
The answer came from a curator during that very BBC shoot in Paris. Louise Welsh put it this way: the mask’s value lies in its mystery; “once you know the name, the year of birth, the biography — the mystery dies.” For a bohemian interior in the 1900s, that was an aesthetic. For a global training standard, it was an engineering solution, even if no one designed it that way. A mannequin does not need a biography: it would only get in the way. A nameless face has no relatives who might claim rights to it; it has no nationality, era, age, or status; it does not frighten a stranger in a foreign country to touch it. An empty face is an interface without noise, a kind of “blank canvas”: every trainee fills in what they need to see — a patient.
The makers of simulators handled the legend like proprietors: for decades, a page titled “The Girl from the River Seine” sat on the corporate website as marketing gold before sliding into a 404 — while the mask itself continued to be reproduced in branded sets of face “skins” for the mannequin.
And, by the way, about Fragile: in the film, the mechanical girl is set in motion by the ghost of a dead child, and in the finale the bad infinity breaks apart. In the real world, everything is wound in reverse: the real girl — if she existed at all — does not haunt hospitals. She lives in every classroom on the planet, where they “drown” and resuscitate her a million times a day, pounding her chest in time with a metronome. Whether she smiles or not now depends on whether your palms landed correctly on her chest.
Sources: Jeremy Grange, “Resusci Anne and L'Inconnue de la Seine” (BBC News Magazine, 16.10.2013); the National EMS Museum archival exhibition “Annie… Annie… Are You OK? The Evolution of Resusci Anne”; Gordetsky J., Rais-Bahrami S., Rabinowitz R. “Annie, Annie! Are You Okay?: Faces Behind the Resusci Anne Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Simulator,” Anesthesia & Analgesia, 2020;131(2):657–659 (PMID 32427659), with correction by Breivik H., Laerdal T. (Anesth Analg 2020;131(6):e254); Lind B. “The birth of the resuscitation mannequin, Resusci Anne, and the teaching of mouth-to-mouth ventilation,” Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica, 2007;51(8):1051–1053 (PMID 17697299); Jain L. “Be a Doll, Blow a Hero: The Apparency of the Drowned,” Public Culture, 2024;36(2):231–254; Wikipedia articles on L'Inconnue de la Seine and Resusci Anne. The fate of the girl in the mask has not been established by documents: all versions of her origins are historical-folkloric reconstructions. The figure of 300 million trained people is the BBC’s estimate as of 2013.