Peter Safar: father of modern cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Countless numbers of people owe their lives to the quick application of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). The technique of coupling positive pressure ventilation and external cardiac compression was the result of the work of Peter Safar, who is also credited with the creation of one of the first intensive care units in the United States as well as one of the first paramedic emergency services.1 Safar was born in Vienna, Austria on April 12, 1924, in a family of physicians (Fig. 1). His father, Karl, was an ophthalmologist and his mother, Vinca, was a pediatrician.2 His grandfather was also a medical publisher whose company eventually became the Vienna branch of Springer-Verlag known as Minerva.3 He was destined to become a physician. As the political climate of Europe deteriorated during the 1930s and Vienna was eventually occupied by Nazi Germany in 1938, Safar’s parents lost their jobs in medicine, due primarily to his mother’s heritage not being “Aryan”. Peter was sent off to a Bavarian labor camp, and would have been drafted into the German army had it not been for his tenacity and ingenuity. He had no intention of being drafted and found that if he rubbed tuberculin cream into his eczema sores