Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 197

St John’s ambulance [Reference]

See image of early sim wars competition:

Dr Henry Heimlich, American Surgeon and also inventor of the Heimlich flutter valve for chest drains.

In 1972, the New York Times reported that more than 3,000 people in the U.S. choked to death that year, making it the sixth most common cause of accidental death.

Dr. Heimlich began by experimenting with beagle dogs and large chunks of meat. After several physical manoeuvres proved to be of no help, Heimlich was intrigued upon learning that by pressing upward on the dog’s diaphragm, the meat shot out. It was the flow of air “as in a small hurricane, not pressure that carried the object away.”

He published his informal findings, an essay entitled “Pop Goes the Café Coronary,” in the June 1974 issue of Emergency Medicine. The method announced in this paper is now universally known as “the Heimlich Manoeuvre.” [Reference]

He last practiced this procedure on a fellow nursing home resident in 2016 aged 96 [Reference]

The horse

According to the National Coronial Information System between July 2000 and November 2010 the horse was responsible for 77 deaths over this time period. The other animal kill rates are listed below:

• Cows = 33
• Dogs = 27
• Kangaroo = 18
• Bees and sharks = 16
• Snakes = 14
• Crocodiles = 9 

Sister Madonna Buder (aka the Iron Nun – see video)

Buder became the overall Ironman world record holder in age at age 82 by finishing the Subaru Ironman Canada on August 26, 2012, she completed the ironman in 16:32:00 minutes.

Dr Claude Beck (1894-1971) in 1947

Beck’s theory was that ventricular fibrillation often occurred in hearts which were fundamentally healthy, in his terms “Hearts that are too good to die”, and that there must be a way of saving them.

Beck first used the technique successfully on a 14-year-old boy who was being operated on for a congenital chest defect. The boy’s chest was surgically opened, and manual cardiac massage was undertaken for 45 minutes until the arrival of the defibrillator. The use of procainamide and defibrillation successfully reverted the boy into a sinus rhythm.

• Beck CS, Pritchard WH, Feil HS. Ventricular fibrillation of long duration abolished by electric shock. J Am Med Assoc. 1947 Dec 13;135(15):985.