Peter Safar

Peter Safar, MD
Born	12 April 1924 Vienna
Died	2 August 2003 Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania
Nationality	Austrian
Fields	Medicine
Alma mater	University of Vienna
Known for	cardiopulmonary resuscitation

Peter Safar (12 April 1924 – 2 August 2003) was an Austrian physician of Czech descent. He is credited with pioneering cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Safar was born in Vienna in 1924 into a medical family. His father was an ophthalmologist and his mother was a pediatrician. He graduated from the University of Vienna in 1948. He married Eva Kyzivat and moved from Vienna to Hartford, Connecticut in 1949 for surgical training at Yale University. He completed training in anesthesiology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1952. That same year, he worked in Lima, Peru and founded that country's first academic anesthesiology department. In 1954, he became Chief of Anesthesiologist at Baltimore City Hospital.

Together with James Elam, he rediscovered the airway, head tilt, chin lift (Step A) and the mouth-to-mouth breathing (Step B) components of CPR and influenced Norwegian doll maker Asmund Laerdal of Laerdal company to design and manufacture mannequins for CPR training called Resusci Anne. Safar, who began to work on cardio pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in 1956 at Baltimore City Hospital, demonstrated in a series of experiments on paralyzed human volunteers that rescuer exhaled air mouth-to-mouth breathing could maintain satisfactory oxygen levels in the non-breathing victim, and showed that even lay people could effectively perform mouth-to-mouth breathing to save lives. He combined the A (Airway) and the B (Breathing) of CPR with the C (chest compressions), and wrote the book ABC of Resuscitation in 1957, which established the basis for mass training of CPR. This A-B-C system for CPR training of the public was later adopted by the American Heart Association, which promulgated standards for CPR in 1973.

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