Coffin set belonging to the temple singer Tamutnofret, composed of an outer coffin, an inner coffin and a “mummy-cover”, a full-length death mask that was placed over the mummy. The origin of the set is a now unknown grave in Thebes. It can be dated back to the reign of Ramses II (approx. 1279-1213 BCE).
For 60 years, medical students have practiced CPR on a dummy doll — dubbed Resusci Annie — compressing her chest and breathing air into her plastic mouth. The face of that dummy, it turns out, isn’t made up. It’s based on the face of a teenage girl found dead in the Seine river in Paris in the late 19th century whose body was never identified but whose visage was captured in a mold, or “death mask.”
A new paper in the Christmas issue of The BMJ — a special edition of the medical journal that can include lighthearted or outside-of-the-box research — tells how the nameless corpse became a CPR manikin and earned the title of “the most kissed girl in the world.”
“Every year we have to carry out mandatory CPR training which utilizes these mannequins,” Dr. Stephanie Loke, co-author of the feature and a dental trainee at Liverpool University Dental Hospital, in Liverpool, U.K., told Live Science in an email. She and her co-author Dr. Sarah McKernon, also of the university’s School of Dentistry, “simply wondered who the face was!” she added. Read more.
