History of first aid — from battlefield to defibrillator on the wall

The idea that an ordinary person can and should intervene and save lives in the first few minutes after an accident is not old. For most of history, help for the injured was left to chance, to field medics on the battlefield, or to the doctor if you were lucky enough to reach one. The organized first aid we teach today is the result of a long development — driven by wars, disasters, and scientific breakthroughs.

§How the kitchen is planned so the work flows smoothly

Before modern first aid wounded soldiers were treated by field medics and barbers with limited knowledge, and the civilian injured had to hope for help from the nearest. There was no uniform training, no alarm system, and no idea of a common sequence of actions. Many died not from the injury itself, but from bleeding, shock, or infection, which people neither understood nor could remedy. Rescue depended entirely on luck and on who happened to be nearby.

§Solferino 1859 — the shock that created the Red Cross

A turning point came after the Battle of Solferino in Northern Italy in June 1859. The Swiss Henri Dunant passed by shortly after the battle and found tens of thousands of wounded and dying soldiers left without help. He organized the local civilian population on the spot—especially women—to care for the wounded regardless of which side they had fought on. Back in Geneva, he wrote in 1862 the book 'Un Souvenir de Solferino' (A Memory of Solferino), which shook Europe. It led in 1863 to the establishment of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the following year to the first Geneva Convention. The idea of organized assistance to the wounded had been born.

“The sight of the wounded left behind at Solferino led Henri Dunant to act — and became the seed for the Red Cross and organised help for people in need.”

— History of first aid

§Esmarch and the word 'erste Hilfe'.

A few years later the Prussian military surgeon Friedrich von Esmarch systematized first aid. Around 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, he introduced formal training of soldiers in helping wounded comrades with pre-trained techniques — bandaging and splinting — and he is credited with giving us the very concept of 'erste Hilfe', or first aid. It was a crucial new idea: that laypeople could be trained in advance to act correctly before professional help arrived.

§First aid and the Samaritans for civilians

In the decades around the year 1900, first aid spread from the military to the civilian population. Samaritan organisations and organisations like the Red Cross began training ordinary people — in workplaces, factories and communities — in stopping bleeding, bandaging wounds and helping in accidents. First aid gradually became a public matter and not just a soldier's task. In Denmark too, a rescue culture emerged, where private rescue corps took care of accidents, the sick and fires.

§The post-war breakthrough — heart-lung resuscitation

Perhaps the biggest leap came around 1960. Until then there was little you could do about a heart attack outside a hospital. In the 1950s doctor Peter Safar showed that mouth-to-mouth breathing could effectively oxygenate an unconscious person and at Johns Hopkins University engineer William Kouwenhoven and his colleagues James Jude and Guy Knickerbocker discovered that rhythmic chest compressions could keep blood moving without opening the chest. In 1960 the two ideas — chest compressions and ventilations — were united into modern cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). The point was revolutionary: resuscitation could now be performed anywhere and 'all you need are two hands'.

§The defibrillator comes out to people

The defibrillator — the device that with an electrical shock can restart a heart rhythm — was developed in the same period (Kouwenhoven and Knickerbocker worked with a model in the late 1950s). Initially it was heavy hospital equipment, operated by doctors. Over time the devices became smaller, safer and automatic, so they could themselves analyse heart rhythm and talk the user through the process. The automated external defibrillator (AED) thus moved out of the hospital and onto the wall in airports, stations, sports halls and companies — so that even an untrained person can use it. Today, early use of the defibrillator is a fixed part of the chain of survival.

§First aid today — knowledge that fades without practice

Today first aid is built on simple trained actions fixed main points and the chain of survival and has been made accessible to everyone through standardized courses. Techniques and ratios are updated continuously based on research so you always follow the latest guidance from your course. An important historical lesson is that help works best when practiced in advance: The great breakthroughs — from Esmarch's trained grip to the talking defibrillator — are all about making the right action simple enough that an ordinary person can perform it when it matters.

“The entire history of first aid points in the same direction: making the life-saving action so simple that a completely ordinary person can perform it in the first, decisive minutes.”

— First aid point