History of cardiopulmonary resuscitation

In August 1767, a group of wealthy and civic-minded citizens in Amsterdam gathered to form the Society for the Recovery of Drowned Persons.[3] This society was the first organized effort to respond to sudden death.[4]

The society's techniques involved a range of methods to resuscitate the human body. The members of the society recommended the following:[5]

1. warming the victim;
2. removing swallowed or aspirated water by positioning the victim's head at a lower position than feet;
3. applying manual pressure to the abdomen;
4. releasing air into the victim's mouth, either using a bellows or with a mouth-to-mouth method;
5. tickling the victim's throat;
6. 'stimulating' the victim by means such as rectal and oral fumigation with tobacco smoke. Bellows were used to drive tobacco smoke, a known irritant, into the intestine through the anus, as this was thought to be enough of a stimulant to engender a response in the "almost" dead
7. bloodletting.

Within four years of their founding, the Society for the Recovery of Drowned Persons claimed to have saved over 150 patients with their recommendations,[6] and the first four of these techniques, or modern variations of them, are still in use today.

Following the successes of the society, rescue societies soon sprang up in most European population centers, all with the goal to find a way of successfully resuscitating victims of sudden death or cardiac arrest. This hypothesis proved so popular that the city of Hamburg in the Holy Roman Empire passed an ordinance in 1769, which provided notices to be read in churches describing the steps of assistance for drowned, strangled, and frozen persons and those overcome by noxious gases, which was the first example of mass medical training. The Royal Humane Society in London, founded in 1774, served as the model for societies in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. These rescue societies of the 18th century were the precursors of today's emergency medical services.[7]

Similar techniques were described in early 20th century literature on jujutsu and judo with some being used as far back as early 17th century. A New York Times correspondent reported that these techniques were being used successfully deployed in Japan in 1910. In jujutsu (and later on, judo), those techniques were called kappo or kutasu.[8] [9][10][11]

Scientists and doctors started to try and address the problem from many different sides including developing new medications, devising new surgical techniques and identifying risk factors. Doctors James Elam, Peter Safar and Archer S. Gordon set to educating the world about rescue breathing, preventive measures and trying to discover a way to treat acute cardiac arrest.

Gordon initially did not support rescue breathing until he performed a study of his own using pediatric patients, reproducing Elam's results. Safar had also been working on the feasibility of rescue breathing, so they agreed that a concerted effort would be much more valuable than each working separately and possibly reproducing each other's work.

Prior to the 1950s, the accepted method of resuscitation was the chest-pressure and arm-lift technique that was shown to be ineffective by Safar and Elam. In 1954, Elam was the first to demonstrate experimentally that exhaled air ventilation was a sound technique. Elam and Safar (and later Gordon) performed many experiments demonstrating the superiority of the rescue breathing technique. The problem then became one of popularizing the method.

Organizations such as the American Red Cross provide training at local chapters in the proper administration of artificial respiration procedures. The Red Cross has been teaching this technique since the mid-1950s. For example, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, volunteer Roger Mehalek introduced a breathing trainer called Miss Sweet Breath 1959, a plaster and plastic training mannequin he created.

In New York, then State Health Commissioner, Herman Hilliboe was impressed with the technique. He commissioned Elam to write the instructional booklet titled "Rescue Breathing," which was distributed nationally in 1959. The success of the booklet spurred Elam to produce films demonstrating this new life-saving technique.

By 1960, rescue breathing had been adopted by the National Academy of Science, American Society of Anesthesiologists, Medical Society of the State of New York and the American Red Cross as the preferred method of resuscitation.

Several key discoveries and understandings were required to treat the problem, which would take decades to work out, and even now is not 'solved'. Doctors speak of the natural history of diseases as a way to understand how therapy alters the usual progression of a disease. For example, the natural history of breast cancer may be measured in months but treated with surgery or chemotherapy the disease can be measured in years or even cured. Sudden cardiac arrest is a disease with an extremely rapid natural history, measured in minutes, with an inexorable outcome. But when treated with CPR the course of death can be extended (CPR will delay the dying process) and if treated with timely defibrillation death can be aborted.

The modern elements of resuscitation for sudden cardiac arrest are cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR in turn consists of mouth-to-mouth ventilation and chest compression), defibrillation and emergency medical services (the means to bring these techniques to the patient quickly).

As early as the 1930s it was known that electric shocks, even small shocks, could induce ventricular fibrillation in dogs' hearts and more powerful shocks could reverse the fibrillation. This early research had been funded by the electric industry concerned about fatal accidents to linemen. Claude Beck, professor of surgery at Western Reserve University (later to become Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland worked for years on a technique for defibrillation of the human heart. Beck believed that electricity could equally benefit the surgery patient whose heart fibrillated during surgery or induction of anaesthesia.

Beck probably witnessed his first cardiac arrest during his internship in 1922 while on the surgery service at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. During a urologic operation, the anaesthetist announced that the patient's heart had stopped. To the amazement of Beck, the surgical resident removed his gloves and went to a telephone in a corner of the room and called the fire department. Beck remained in total bewilderment as the fire department rescue squad rushed into the operating room 15 minutes later and applied oxygen-powered respirators to the patient's face. The patient died, but the episode left an indelible impression on him. Beck would go on to develop techniques to take back the management of cardiac arrest from the fire department and place it in the hands of surgeons.

Beck realized that ventricular fibrillation often occurred in hearts that were basically sound and he coined the phrase "Hearts too good to die." In 1947, Beck accomplished his first successful resuscitation of a 14-year-old boy using open chest massage and internal defibrillation with alternating current. The boy was being operated on for a severe congenital funnel chest. In all other respects the boy was normal. During the closure of the large incision in the chest, the pulse suddenly stopped and the blood pressure fell to zero. The boy was in cardiac arrest. Dr. Beck immediately reopened the chest and began manual heart massage. As he looked at and felt the heart, he realized that ventricular fibrillation was present. Massage was continued for 35 minutes at which time an electrocardiogram was taken that confirmed the presence of ventricular fibrillation. Another 10 minutes passed before the defibrillator was brought to the operating room. The first shock using electrode paddles placed directly on the sides of the heart was unsuccessful. Beck administered procaine amide, a medicine to stabilize the heart's rhythm. Beck gave a second shock that wiped out the fibrillation. In a very few seconds a feeble, regular, and fast contraction of the heart occurred. The blood pressure rose from zero to 50 millimeters of mercury. Beck noted that the heartbeat remained regular and saw that the pressure slowly began to rise. Twenty minutes after the successful defibrillation, the chest wound was closed. By three hours, the blood pressure rose to a normal level, and the child awoke and was able to answer questions. The boy made a full recovery, with no neurological damage.[17]

Beck pioneered internal defibrillation of the heart. In other words, the chest had to be open and the defibrillator paddles placed directly on the heart. It was ground breaking work but soon to be eclipsed by devices that could externally defibrillate the heart through the closed chest.

For Paul Zoll, well aware of Beck's accomplishment, the development of an external defibrillator was a natural extension of his earlier work with an external cardiac pacemaker In 1955 a 67-year-old man survived several episodes of ventricular fibrillation, thanks to Zoll's external defibrillator, and went home from the hospital a month later. Over a period of four months, Zoll had successfully stopped ventricular fibrillation eleven times in four different patients. The energy required for defibrillation ranged from 240 to 720 joules. Zoll's findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1956.

The defibrillator designed by Zoll, as well as earlier versions invented by Kouwenhoven and Beck, utilized alternating current and were run from line voltage, the electricity from any wall socket. The decision to use alternating current rather than direct current was a practical one. Direct current batteries and capacitor technology both powerful enough to do the job and portable enough for practical use simply didn't exist in the early 1950s. These AC defibrillators were very large and heavy, primarily because they contained a transformer to step up the line voltage from 110 volts to 500 or 1000 volts. The only good feature is that they could be mounted on wheels and pushed down the hallway from one part of the hospital to another. Not many lives would be saved unless the inherent non-portability of AC defibrillators could be solved.

The portability problem was solved by Bernard Lown. Lown devised a defibrillator that utilized direct current instead of alternating current. A series of animal experiments on dogs in 1960 and 1961 and clinical uses in patients in the early 1960s established that DC shocks were extremely effective in shocking the heart.[18] What's more, it was clear that DC was actually safer than AC when applied through the chest wall. With direct current it was possible to use power, supplied by a battery, to charge a capacitor over a few seconds. The capacitor stored the energy until it was released in one massive jolt to the chest wall. The availability of new, small capacitors considerably reduced the size and weight of the device. The defibrillator could now travel to the patient.

The extensive international readership of the Lancet helps explain why Pantridge's idea spread so rapidly to other countries. Within 2 years, similar physician staffed MCCU programs began in Australia and Europe. The first program in the United States was started in 1968 by William Grace out of St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village in New York City. The program was a clone of the Belfast program and utilized specially equipped ambulances with physicians on board to provide advanced resuscitation care directly at the scene of cardiac emergencies. Calls for medical emergencies in which chest pain was a complaint were passed on from the police 911 operator to the hospital. There an ambulance would fight New York traffic to arrive at the scene. Grace described the rather full ambulance and how it was sent:

"The personnel includes an attending physician, resident physician, emergency room nurse, ECG technician, as well as a student nurse observer, in addition to the driver and his assistant. This team is summoned from various points in the hospital to the emergency room by a personal paging system which each member of the team carries. This team has four and one half minutes to get to the emergency room, obtain their equipment and board the ambulance. Anyone who is not there within this time is left behind."[19]

In a scientific report of the St. Vincent's program, Grace described the experience with the first 161 patients (ref). Only two instances occurred in which the physician did not make the 4½-minute deadline and the ambulance left without the physician. The ambulance reached the scene usually within 14 minutes, plus of course the 4½-minute pre-response time. One call took 25 minutes owing to heavy traffic. Among the first group of patients seen by the MCCU were three patients treated for ventricular fibrillation. One of the three survived.

Grace took this concept, imported from overseas, and made it work in his community. Physicians with defibrillators rushing through the city to reach a non-breathing, unconscious person whose heart had stopped were quite unusual by 1968 standards. However, the program was limited in vision, and although it could work in some communities, it was not nationally applicable. An evolution in prehospital emergency care was needed.

The evolution from physician-staffed mobile intensive care units to paramedic-staffed units in the United States occurred independently and almost simultaneously in several communities. Two communities that led the way were Miami and Seattle, but others included Portland, Oregon, Los Angeles, and Columbus, Ohio. These communities were a major evolutional advance compared to the Belfast or New York City programs. Not only were paramedics used instead of physicians, but from their inception the programs were established to deal with the problem of sudden cardiac arrest. Pantridge's program was established primarily to reach the victim of MI fast and thereby prevent mortality in the vulnerable early stage of this event. Thus cardiac arrest was successfully treated only if it occurred as a complication of MI and only if the ambulance was already at the scene or en route. The new paramedic programs were far more nimble than physician-based programs and were specifically designed not only to treat the early stages of MI, but also to attempt resuscitation for sudden cardiac arrest wherever and whenever it occurred. Reversal of death itself would be a major purpose and goal of the new paramedic programs.

Eugene Nagel became aware of Pantridge's work in 1967. He believed that the physician-staffed model of prehospital care was not going to work for the United States in general or for Miami in particular. Physicians were too expensive to sit around fire stations waiting for calls, and if they had to be picked up in hospitals, it would take too long to arrive at the scene. When Nagel or his colleague James Hirschman, rode on the ambulance themselves they could, of course, defibrillate and provide medications, but they could not be present on all shifts. Nagel became convinced it was time to move away from a program using physicians to one staffed by paramedics.

Nagel moved incrementally. He did not think he could initially sell the idea of paramedics working alone, even if they had authorization to perform medical procedures signed by physicians. So instead his first step was to establish a radio link and telemetry between the paramedic fire fighters and the hospital. Nagel's had a hidden agenda in promoting telemetry. For Nagel it gained him access through the legal impediments stopping fire fighters from defibrillating patients and administering medications. Nagel reasoned that if the fire department could send the ECG signal to the hospital via telemetry, then the fire fighters (with special training) could be authorized by the physician to administer needed drugs and procedures before arriving in the emergency department. He believed a paramedic at the scene was a legal extension of a physician. He recalled later, "We saw telemetry as the key to extending our treatment to outside the hospital where hitherto trying to legislate it was the dark side of the moon in those days. The telemetry looked like it might be the 'open sesame' to doing some treatment pre-hospital."

Nagel hoped to find support from the medical community; instead he only encountered discouragement. Nagel recalled this opposition, "It was a rare doctor that favored us doing any of this stuff – very rare. We had incidents in the street when we were just sending an ECG, where doctors on the scene would tell the firemen to quit fooling around and haul the victim in."

Nagel recalled the first save of the Miami paramedic program. The collapse occurred near Station 1, on the fringe of downtown Miami. He reminisced:

"There was a guy named Dan Jones who was then about 60 years old, who was a wino who lived in a fleabag in the bad part of town. Jones was well known to rescue. In June of '69 they got a call – man down – it was Jones. They put the paddles on him, he was in VF, started CPR, zapped him, he came back to sinus rhythm, brought him into ER and three days later he was out and walking around. In gratitude, about a week later, he came down to Station 1, which he had never done before, and he said he would like to talk to the man who saved his life. They told me they had never seen Dan Jones in a clean shirt and sober, both of which he was that day. He would periodically come to the fire house and just say hello and he seemed to be sober. In my talks in those days I said this was the new cure for alcoholism. That was our first true save."

Pantridge's article also energized Leonard Cobb in Seattle. He knew the Seattle Fire Department was already involved in first aid and therefore approached the Fire Chief, Gordon Vickery, to propose a new training program to treat cardiac arrest. The fire department already had one of the United States' first computerized systems for documenting first aid runs. Cobb realized that this system could provide scientific documentation for the efficacy (or lack thereof) of Pantridge's suggestions and suggested to Vickery that they pool their knowledge and resources. Cobb and his colleagues then provided instruction and training in cardiac emergencies including cardiac arrest to volunteer fire fighters. The program became operational in March 1970, nine months after Nagel's first save in Miami. The mobile unit was stationed outside the Harborview Hospital emergency department. As Cobb himself points out, the mobile unit was not the real innovation. Rather, it was the concept of a tiered response to medical emergencies. The idea was "that we would get someone out there quickly" – via the fire department's already existing mobile first aid units – "and then a secondary response would come from the mobile intensive coronary care unit." The beauty of the tiered response system was the efficient use of fire department personnel, which allowed aid personnel to reach the scene quickly (on an average of three minutes) to start CPR. Then a few minutes later the paramedics arrived to provide more definitive care such as defibrillation. In this way the brain could be kept alive until the electric shock converted the heart to a normal rhythm. After stabilization the paramedics would transport the patient to the hospital.

The Seattle paramedic program did more than pioneer paramedics and promote the tiered response system. It was the first program in the world to make citizens part of the emergency system. Cobb knew from data the program had collected that the sooner CPR was started, the better the chances of survival. He reasoned that the best way to ensure early initiation of CPR was to train the bystanders. Thus Cobb, with the support of Vickery, began a program in 1972 called Medic 2. Its goal was to train over 100,000 people in Seattle how to do CPR. Cobb recalled how the idea was first proposed:

One day Vickery said, "Look, if it's so important to get CPR started quickly and if firemen come around to do it, it can't be that complicated that other folks couldn't also learn – firemen are not created by God to do CPR. You could train the public." Cobb said, "That sounds like a very good idea."

Cobb decided to use an abbreviated course of training. "We weren't going to do it by traditional ways where they had to come for 20 hours (of training). So they had to do it at one sitting – how long will people participate? – well, maybe three hours and that's pretty much the way it was." Cobb cautiously did not state how long it would take to train 100,000 people. He had no idea. In fact it took only a few years and by the 20th anniversary of the citizen training program over half a million people in Seattle and the surrounding suburbs had received training in CPR.

Some people were sceptical about mass citizen training in CPR; indeed, many felt the potential for harm was too great to allow such a procedure in the hands of laypersons. The skeptics also had the support of national medical organizations. The alarmist voices were stilled by some fortunate saves. Cobb recalled one resuscitation soon after the citizen training program began. "In March 1973 there were these kids playing golf at Jackson Park. They came across a victim a quarter of a mile from the clubhouse." The man was unconscious and not breathing; later it was confirmed that he was in ventricular fibrillation. "But these kids had taken the [CPR] course over at the local high school. Two or three of them started doing CPR and the other kid ran off and phoned the fire department. Shortly they came with the aid car and Medic 1 screaming over the fairways." Cobb concluded, "They got him started up again. He survived; he's alive today [1990]. That was a very convincing story. I didn't mind it being written up in the Reader's Digest."

By the early 1970s CPR, defibrillation, and a rapid means to provide prehospital care were all in place. The structure to resuscitate sudden death victims had been built and was proving successful. That most of the world did not have this structure in place in the 1970s was largely due to lack of diffusion and spread of the ideas, rather than the impossibility of carrying them out.

However, the story of resuscitation does not stop in the early 1970s. Major advances have continued. In 1980 the first program to train EMTs to perform defibrillation began in King County, Washington, and similar programs spread throughout the United States. This training required 10 hours, and in the first demonstration project, survival from ventricular fibrillation increased from 7% to 26%. In 1984 the first program with fire fighter EMTs using automated external defibrillators (AEDs) also began in King County, Washington. The use of AEDs simplified the training of EMTs and thus allowed the procedure to spread more rapidly throughout communities. Automated external defibrillators require considerably less training time compared to manual defibrillators since the EMT does not have to interpret the cardiac rhythm.

The idea for an automated defibrillator was first conceived by Dr. Arch Diack, a surgeon in Portland, Oregon. During the early 1970s, Dr. Diack and Dr. W. Stanley Welborn developed a portable unit called a Cardiac Automatic Resuscitative Device [CARD] that could diagnose a heart that was stopped or fibrillating and deliver an electrical shock capable of restarting it. The device, which later became known as 'Heart-Aid', was programmed to diagnose specific problems. It was designed for temporary use by laymen in emergency situations before professional care could be administered. Arch Diack was the first person to conceive of an automated electronic defibrillator. His prototype, literally assembled in a basement, utilized a unique defibrillatory pathway – tongue to chest, via a plastic airway with an electrode mounted on it. Using this "Esophageal Pathway" proved less traumatic for tissues and used a smaller electrical charge. There was also a breath detector, that was a safeguard to prevent shocking breathing persons. The electrode was essentially a rate counter, far cruder than today's sophisticated VF detectors. All in all, a seemingly more efficient treatment. Arch Diack, MD, Craig Berkman, Atty, Scott Dean and Brad Jeffries, Engineers, Vickie Dean, Circuit Board and Mechanical Assembler and Barbara Corl (Moore), FDA Documentation & Corporate Administration and Records, built the first production units in a small, two room, rented space in an office-building in Sylvan, Oregon, just outside of Portland. Later as the company grew they moved to an Office Park in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

The first production model weighed 17 pounds - the design parameter was "size similarity to that of a portable typewriter" of the day. It used a tape recorder to give verbal instructions to the Laymen, as well as to record the event, for study, research and legal requirements. It had a foam pad with printed instructions and diagrams with an electrode, for the bystander/layman to apply to the patient's chest. Insert airway then "hands off" warning and the machine, did the rest. Miraculous for its time. By the late 1980s, the small company, named CRC (Cardiac Resuscitator Corp.) was in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and had been purchased by Emerson Radio, The CRC production teams were dedicated and extremely excited every time a new tape from an 'event' came in. It was not uncommon to have the team display intense emotions and responses, both positive and negative, based on the results of these tapes.

In the mid 1980s, the idea had taken hold, and other manufacturers began entering the field, leading to the automated external defibrillators (AEDs) that we have today. Current AEDs, like regular defibrillators, use electrode pads attached to the chest. AEDs are programmed to guide the operator (with a series of voice prompts) through the procedure. The pads once attached automatically detect the type of heart rhythm and if VF is present the AED instructs the operator to press a button (usually flashing red) to shock the patient. From EMT defibrillation with AEDs, there was a natural and logical progression to first responder defibrillation (AEDs used by police or security personnel), next widespread Public Access Defibrillation (AEDs used by lay persons in public locations such as airports, schools, exercise facilities, etc.) and finally home AED including the opportunity to purchase AEDs over the counter without a prescription.

In 1981 a program to provide telephone instructions in CPR began in King County, Washington. This program used the emergency dispatchers to give instant directions while the fire department EMT personnel were in route to the scene. This demonstration project increased the rate of bystander-provided CPR by 50%. Dispatcher-assisted CPR is now standard care for dispatcher centers throughout the United States and in other countries such as Israel, Great Britain, Sweden, and Norway.

The American Heart Association uses and a metaphor of four links in a chain to describe the elements of successful resuscitation. These links are early access (recognizing cardiac arrest and calling 911), early CPR, early defibrillation, and early advanced care (such as medications, endotracheal intubation) The early paramedic programs were all designed to provide CPR, defibrillation, and advanced care quickly enough to resuscitate patients in cardiac arrest.

CPR has continued to advance, with recent developments including an emphasis on constant, rapid heart stimulation, without respiration. Studies have shown that people who had rapid, constant hands-only chest compression 22% more likely to survive than those receiving conventional, CPR that included breathing. What's more, because people tend to be reluctant to do mouth-to-mouth, chest-only CPR nearly doubles the chances of survival overall, by increasing the odds of receiving CPR in the first place.[20]

Further advanced technologies to supplement CPR are being tested. These include the use of drones to deliver defibrillators to patients undergoing CPR outside hospital, as well as placing patients in whom CPR is ongoing but cardiac rhythm cannot be restored onto heart-lung bypass (ECMO) machines. This then allows them to be transported to specialist centres where the cause of their cardiac arrest (a blocked coronary artery for example) can be addressed. So called 'ECMO-CPR' may yet further revolutionize the way in which CPR is delivered. Trials of pre-hospital ECMO-CPR in France and Australia have been promising.