There is no question that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is vastly more effective than the medically endorsed methods that preceded it. By 1959 rescue breathing using the mouth-to-mouth technique had become the mandated medical standard. Understandably, trying to mimic the complex action of the diaphragm and accessory muscle of the chest wall in normal negative pressure ventilation were difficult, cumbersome and often ineffective. (Silvester HR., A new method of resuscitating still-born children, and of restoring the persons apparently drowned or dead. Ībove: an illustration of the Silvester method of artificial respiration circa 1880. Naturally enough, when medicine began to try to restore breathing when it had ceased, most of the attempts that were made were attempts to simulate the natural process whereby air is moved in and out of the lungs principally by negative intrathoracic pressure. We thus breathe by means of negative pressure ventilation. When we relax those muscles, the natural elasticity, or recoil of the chest wall and diaphragm acts to squeeze the air out, and the cycle is then repeated. Mostly this is a result of the fact that we breathe using our diaphragms and the muscles of our chest wall to create a low grade vacuum inside the chest into which air rushes via the trachea to fill our lungs. In other words, there is always a slight vacuum in those parts of the chest. ![]() One of the hardest concepts for me to grasp was that under normal conditions the pressure inside the pleural space (the space around the lungs) and the mediastinal spaces (the space that surrounds the heart and the great vessels of the chest) is always negative relative to both the atmospheric pressure and the pressure in the rest of the body (more on this later). The physiology of the vertebrate chest is a truly amazing thing and it can take very bright men years to master its implications. ![]() We are told that breath is life and there is great truth in this saying. ![]() What’s more, in many in whom breathing has newly ceased, simply opening the airway, or giving a single rescue breath will restore spontaneous respiration. Without breath there is no life and the most obviously and easily detected sign that life is fleeing is the absence of breath. Since the beginning of modern resuscitation over 40 years ago the sequence of interventions, and to a great extent their importance, has been determined by the ABCs of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR): Airway, Breathing and Circulation. Genesis 2:7įor breath is life, and if you breathe well you will live long on earth. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.
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