The Royal Humane Society and resuscitation

The Society's printed directions began with how to carry the body: gently, by two or more people, never head down over a shoulder, rolled on the ground or over a barrel, or lifted by the heels. It was then to be dried and warmed with heated blankets, bottles of hot water, warm bricks, or a healthy person lying alongside. Next came stimulation. One helper was to blow forcefully into the lungs, mouth to mouth with the nostrils closed, and press the chest to let the air out again. Another blew tobacco smoke into the bowel through a fumigator, and a third rubbed the body with brandy or salt. The attempt was to go on for two hours or more, because the common belief that the drowned revived within minutes or not at all had, the Society wrote, cost many lives.

The model came from Amsterdam, where a society founded in 1767 had offered rewards for saving the drowned; Milan, Hamburg and Paris followed. In 1773 the physician Thomas Cogan translated the Amsterdam society's memoirs, and William Hawes, a medical man practising in the Strand, took up the cause. In 1774 the two men founded the Humane Society in London, with the Lord Mayor, Frederick Bull, as president.

Money did much of the work. The Society's plan paid two guineas, shared among up to four people, for any attempt to revive someone taken from the water for dead within 30 miles of London and Westminster, and four guineas if the person recovered. A publican who took in the body received a guinea and was spared the cost of burial if the attempt failed. Medical men stationed near the places where drownings were most frequent agreed to attend free and were to keep a fumigator ready. In the Society's report for 1776, fishermen and labourers collected rewards, and one publican was paid for lodging a revived woman for three days. By then it counted 107 lives saved since its founding.

By 1795 it was the Royal Humane Society, and similar institutions had been set up in Liverpool, Norwich, Worcester, Chester and Dublin. Mouth-to-mouth breathing later gave way to bellows. After animal experiments reported by Leroy in 1827 and 1828 blamed bellows for damaging the lungs, the Society dropped bellows and positive-pressure breathing from its official scheme.