In the UK alone, there are over 30,000 Cardiac arrests occurring outside of hospital each year, many of which sadly resulting in fatality. However, effective bystander CPR (combined with the use of a defibrillator) can double or even triple a victim’s chances of survival. But how did medics discover this fact?

I, along with many others, have concerns about the use and welfare of pets in medical laboratories, however, this particular discovery has proved ground-breaking and of benefit to pets and humans throughout the world.

The success of the ‘kiss of life’ combined with the use of a defibrillator has a very interesting history, stretching back as far as 100 years and the extent of its potential and its discovery can be in part accredited to a very special, but unnamed dog.

Guy Knickerbocker was an electrical engineer working in one of the labs at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, but was really interested in the external defibrillator, which Kouwenhoven had invented a few years earlier. Their experiments involved testing on laboratory dogs.

When one of the dogs they were working with had a cardiac arrest and their heart was in ventricular fibrillation, Knickerbocker started to pump the dog’s chest and then raced along the stairs to the fifth floor to get the defibrillator. Meanwhile his colleagues pressed the dog’s chest for 20 minutes – four times longer than any previous successful attempt at resuscitation.

When he arrived back with the defibrillator and administered two shocks, the dog sprang back to life. The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated; the experiment established beyond doubt that rhythmic pressing of the chest could sustain life, and using a defibrillator could restore life.

Knickerbocker says: “We had found a way to slow down the dying process, and give people time to receive defibrillation”.

Knickerbocker began to work with a Cardiac Surgeon – Dr Jim Jude who worked in the lab next door and they worked together to perfect the compression technique and found they were able to extend the dog’s life for an hour.

They discovered that pushing on the chest could simulate nearly 40% of normal cardiac activity and they were keen to see if this could be applied to humans. A year later, a young female patient was admitted for a gall bladder operation and went into cardiac arrest. Dr Jude saved her with the chest compressions and she went on to make a full recovery.

The team published a paper in 1960 stating that “Anyone, anywhere, can now initiate cardiac resuscitative procedures,” the authors concluded. “All that is needed are two hands.”

In collaboration with another research group who were looking at ventilation techniques, they developed modern CPR which has gone on to save many lives of both humans and pets.