Artificial respiration, in its earliest form, was described thus: for the purpose of restoring persons apparently drowned or dead. In the middle of the nineteenth century, medical practitioners recognized that any method used for resuscitation should require no more than one person and no medical equipment. Think about it. You break out in a rash, fracture a bone, you receive a wound, you succumb to disease . . . all of these things afford a victim time to be taken to hospital. Time for the doctor to be called. But if somebody stops breathing, say he has a cardiac arrest or has been pulled from the water, there are minutes only to save his life. The procedure had to be accessible to anyone present – doctor or not.

The early developers of artificial respiration advocated certain manipulations of the body. They understood that some sort of manual inspiration and expiration of air was required to get oxygen back into the lungs, into the blood.

These men knew that the cessation of breath didn’t have to mean the end of life.

Experimenting on dogs and cadavers, a physician by the name of Silvester developed a technique wherein the victim was laid on his back with his arms at his sides. To force inhalation of air, the arms were raised above the victim’s head, expanding the ribcage and creating a vacuum, forcing outside air to rush into the lungs. To expire this air, the arms of the victim were crossed over his chest and great pressure was applied there. The biggest problem with this method was that the victim’s relaxed tongue filled the mouth, blocking the movement of air.

Some forty years later, another doctor, a Mr Schafer (who had moved on from dogs and dead bodies to live, hyperventilated test subjects) turned his victim on to the front and applied pressure to the lower part of the back, just above the buttocks, forcing air out of the thorax. This helped alleviate, in part, the problem of the tongue, but reduced the volume of air exchange.

Having no better alternatives, both the Silvester and Schafer methods were taught and employed across Europe and overseas. Of course, there would have been people residing in either camp, and I’m sure arguments over which method was superior reached religious heights, but nothing much changed until, in the 1930s, a fitness instructor in the Danish army cunningly blended both methods to create the Nielsen method, which was eventually accepted by the International Red Cross. Nielsen’s method required one operator positioned at the prone victim’s head. The arms of the victim would be raised and bent at the elbows, so that the hands were under the head. Pressure would be applied to the shoulder blades to expel air, and the arms would be grasped at the elbows and raised for inhalation. This method could be applied for hours, was straightforward and seemed to be the final answer.

But the midwives, Bear, as far back as the sixteenth century, knew better than all of these men. They knew that to save the life of a non-breathing infant you had to create a seal around the infant’s mouth and nose with your own mouth and to exhale directly into the infant’s lungs. This was natural and effective, but was never accepted by any medical bodies as official procedure because it was considered vulgar. And all through those decades that the learned men argued over arm positioning and whether a victim should be prone or facing the sky, the midwives continued to save lives this way.