Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was first formulated in contemporary medical language in a presentation John Fothergill gave at the Royal Society of London. He called it “the kiss of life.” It was poorly received.
As Lana Citron recounts it wasn’t until the idea was revived by James Elam and Peter Safar in the 1950s that the practice was granted medical legitimacy and was adopted in practice. It is interesting to note that in its legitimation both the idea of “kiss” and the idea of “life” were dropped from the name and exchanged with the much more impersonal-sounding —and therefore hygienic-sounding— “mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”
Kissing had long since ceased to be a public social action shared in a variety of ways among a variety of social persons. It had already been rendered, at least in Anglo-American societies, almost exclusively romantic and private. A kiss is something done by individuals in private, but mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is a public act. Language was employed to keep any of the meaning invested in kissing from polluting the act of resuscitation.
But, of course, this is deceptive. Of course, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is a kiss. Though not necessarily romantic it does what all kissing does —unite two individuals by lips in which life is shared, breathe is given, and a new thing formed: the kiss. Pablo Maurette puts it simply when two people share a kiss (of any kind), they “are no longer two persons but one kiss.”
When Elisha raises the Shunammite’s son, he stretches himself mouth-to-mouth, eye-to-eye, and hand-to-hand (also making the sign of the cross) upon the dead child and breathes into him the breathe of life in imitation of the “first kiss” when God breathed into Adam (2 Kings 4:18-37; Gen. 2:7).
How differently might things be if we allowed biblical imagery to name our practices of healing? What would life be like if after drowning a resuscitated person was told “Go thank that person, you owe them your life, they kissed you and brought you back from the grave.”
Or, more despairingly, what might happen if we continue to let the creep of medico-hygienic speech to continue unchecked? What little child will be moved by a fairy tale told of a princess who, laying under a deathly spell, was awaken not by a kiss but by the administration of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?