Heart and Bowl

“In 1988, a 65-year-old man’s heart stopped at home. His wife and son didn’t know CPR, so in desperation they grabbed a toilet plunger to get his heart going until an ambulance showed up. Later, after the man recovered at San Francisco General Hospital, his son gave the doctors there some advice: Put toilet plungers next to all of the beds in the coronary unit. The hospital didn’t do that, but the idea got the doctors thinking about better ways to do CPR.” NYT (Gift Article): How a Toilet Plunger Improved CPR.