Resuscitation of near drowning victims has a long tradition. In contrast, before the emergence of obstetrics in the 18th c., medical reports on newborn resuscitation were limited to scattered accounts of midwives who successfully practiced oral insufflation. The earliest reference which I have found mentioning tracheal intubation of newborns appears in Smellie's treatise on obstetrics (1752). In 1776, John Hunter established a physiologic connection between initiating respiration and resuscitation of the newborn. During the next c., the technical advances in newborn resuscitation took place nearly exclusively in Paris. Following immediately upon Lavoisier's discovery of oxygen, Chaussier (1780) reported on an apparatus for newborn resuscitation which consisted of an oxygen reservoir and bellows connected to a curved laryngeal tube of his design. Subsequently, tracheal intubation (using palpation) for clearing secretions and lung inflation seems to have been widely practiced in France. In 1877, Ribemont, a student of Tarnier, devised an improved endotracheal tube for newborns, based upon anatomic studies of cadavers. Ribemont reported on 22 obstetrical students “taken at random and by no means familiar with the practice of catheterizing the larynx”, of whom 14 were successful at a first intubation attempt. Another Tarnier protege, Pierre Budin, extended endotracheal intubation to resuscitation of depressed premature newborns. Outside the large Parisian maternity hospitals, noninstrumental methods retained currency. These included several bizarre methods for inflation by vigorously swinging the baby (“Schultzing”). Remarkably, until the 1920s, several notable German and American clinicians endorsed these techniques. Since caesarean section (C/S) was contraindicated in the presence of maternal infection, it is not surprising that the number of technical reports describing fetal destruction (embryotomy/craniotomy) until the 1910s exceeded the number of reports describing neonatal resuscitation. It appears that modern efforts to popularize newborn resuscitation techniques coincided with the development of aseptic C/S and entry of pediatricians to delivery settings. This study raises several questions: Despite the 19th c. popularization of resuscitation for near drowning victims (especially in England), why were similar measures less frequently applied to depressed newborns? Did the emergence of newborn special care in France in the 1870s facilitate technical advance in resuscitation while limiting its diffusion to other settings?