When describing the lifelong work of Professor Peter Safar, his colleagues and successors Ake Grenvik and Patrick Kochanek called their teacher the Michelangelo of acute medicíně. Just as Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564) became the acknowledged and unsurpassed universal fine artist of the climax of rena-issance when he created unique works of sculpture, painting, architecture and even poetry, the anaesthe-siologist Peter Safar achieved woridwide acknowledgement for the scientific evidence, creation and general introduction of cardiopulmonary resuscitation and following this the introduction and development of modern prehospital and hospital critical care. He is the author of the term "brain resuscitation". He laid down the foundations of the whole specialty of acute medicíně: intensive care, emergency medicíně and disaster medicíně. During the Cold War he actively worked with academie V. A. Negovsky from Moscow and his Research Institute of General Reanimatology of the Academy of the Medical Sciences of the USSR. For many long years he worked dosely with anaesthesiologists - researchers of former Czechoslovakia H. Keszler and myself. Peter Safar extended his humanitarian activities beyond the frame of medicíně to the world of international politics. In the time when the world was endangered by a nuclear disaster, he formed the organization International Physicians for Prevention of the Use of Nuclear Weapons. He was the founder of the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicíně (WADEM) and of the Society for Critical Care Medicíně - the two professional organizations expressing his vision of continuous medical care.

        Key words: history of anaesthesiology - cardiopulmonary resuscitation - brain resuscitation - emergency medicine - distaster medicine