The Unknown Woman of the Seine
L’Inconnue de la Seine (French for “the unknown woman of the Seine”) was an unidentified young woman whose death mask became a popular fixture on the walls of artists’ homes after 1900. Her visage was the inspiration for numerous literary works.
According to an often-repeated story, the body of the young woman was pulled out of the Seine River at the Quai du Louvre in Paris around the late 1880s. Since the body showed no signs of violence, suicide was suspected.
It was then sent to the Paris Morgue, so the story goes, to be put on display in the hopes that a passerby would identify it. No such luck.
In the following years, numerous copies were produced. The copies quickly became a fashionable morbid fixture in Parisian Bohemian society. Albert Camus and others compared her enigmatic smile to that of the Mona Lisa, inviting numerous speculations as to what clues the eerily happy expression in her face could offer about her life, her death, and her place in society.
Fast forward to 1960. An Austrian doctor named Peter Safar was developing the basics of CPR and needed a way for people to practice his new method. He tracked down a toy maker in Norway, Asmund Laerdal, who had constructed prosthetic wounds for use in military training. Ultimately, Laerdal decided the best way to learn artificial resuscitation would to practice on a dummy. All he needed was the perfect face.
(Source: iTriage Health—How It Came To Be: The True Story Behind “CPR Annie”, Radiolab—’Death Mask’ Episode)