The mostly forgotten technique of mouth-to-mouth ventilation finally came back into favor in the mid-20th century, beginning with its "accidental rediscovery" by James Elam (1918 - 1995). In 1946, during a poliomyelitis epidemic in Minnesota, Elam — an anesthesiologist — resorted to mouth-to-mouth ventilation on many occasions to successfully rescue paralyzed patients when their mechanical ventilators failed. Based on this experience, Elam and his team performed a series of experiments in the early 1950s using pharmacologically paralyzed human volunteers to demonstrate that this technique could effectively maintain adequate levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood.
