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Edu. Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. In late 19th century Paris, rescue workers pulled a young woman's body out of the River Seine. By the time she was lifted out of the water, she was already dead from an apparent drowning. But strangely, there was no panic or fear in her eyes. Instead, a rescue worker brushed the damp hair away from her face and found a beautiful, peaceful half smile on her lips. The workers didn't find anything in the woman's pockets that identified her by name, so as was customary at the time, they took her body to the Paris mortuary. There she was put on display in the window that hopes that someone passing by would recognize and put a name to her serene face. The woman's family never did come by and identify her, but her enigmatic expression turned the heads of everyone who walked past morbid. Crowds gathered in the street to get a look at her eerily calm smile. And the Unknown Woman of the Seine, as she became known, was a local celebrity. Celebrity. The pathologist who worked at the mortuary was so taken by her mysterious beauty that he made a cast of her face and before long it was being used to create plaster replicas that were sold in souvenir shops all across Europe. Over the next few decades, the Unknown Woman became the subject of poems, paintings and novels, all of which tried to fill in the blanks of who she was and what had led to to her drowning. The most popular legend was that she had thrown herself into the river due to a broken heart. One novelist imagined her as an innocent country girl who was seduced by a rich Parisian man. Meanwhile, another portrayed her as an evil force whose death mask draws the narrator into an all consuming obsession. But even as the Unknown Woman of the Seine became the most famous face in Europe, the actual woman at the heart of the myth remained unidentified as the decades passed and her fame gradually faded. The unknown woman might have been lost to history if a Norwegian toy manufacturer hadn't given her a second life. In the 1950s, a toymaker named Asmund Lehrdahl got an unusual request for a custom project. A physician wanted him to develop a doll to help doctors practice a new life saving technique called cardiopulmonary resuscitation, better known as cpr. The doll had to be life sized and functional, with open lips that could be used to practice mouth to mouth resuscitation and a realistic face to make the training exercise more emotionally impactful and thus more memorable. And Laerdal was the perfect man for the job. He sculpted the mannequin's body out of soft plastic and metal springs, and when it was time to design the face, an old image stirred in his memory. A plaster bust that hung on the wall of his wife's parents house. It was the peaceful visage of the Unknown Woman of the Seine. The CPR doll known as Resussi Annie debuted in 1960 and over the coming decades hundreds of thousands of people across the globe learned CPR on versions of her, earning the Woman of the Seine the a reputation as the most kissed face in the world.
