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@skylarynn

Yes! Midwives have known for thousands of years “the kiss of life” to revive newborns who weren’t breathing well on birth. While some overly academic physicians might have “interesting” ideas about resuscitation (such as covering the body in hot coals or pouring hot tea down the throat), your average barber surgeon / village healer would know some fundamentals of resuscitation. The kiss of life was fairly well known – being that much of medieval European society had heard about the breath of life in Genesis, it’s not a far stretch to try and give a breath of your own to someone not breathing. The medieval Persians in 1400 had developed a technique not dissimilar to CPR, with regulated breaths and chest compressions, but it’s unknown if their technique spread to Europe; ironically, as the Middle Ages came to a close and scientific thought became pre-eminent in the Renaissance, Early Modern period and the Enlightenment, medical practitioners became even more intolerant of outside ideas than their medieval forebears and ignorant of the fundamentals of medical care that their predecessors had taken for granted, like sanitation, clean bandages, clean surgical instruments, and herbal medicine.

So a big question here is – does your boy actually have a pulse? It sounds like he was able to swim his way out of the water before losing consciousness, so I’ll hazard that his heart is still beating and he is not in cardiac arrest. This simplifies things, as it’s a bit of a crapshoot whether medieval medicine understood chest compressions. Midwives might well have known it from their work in reviving newborns, but the academic medical establishment didn’t bother writing down the old wisdom of village healers, wise women, and witches (though they only really started making a stink about witchcraft after the Middle Ages had ended and the Renaissance begun in the late 1400s through the 1600s).

So – the medieval process for reviving a drowning victim and handling hypothermia. A well salted sailor or a midwife / healer in a coastal or lakeside town would probably be well versed in saving drowning victims, and pretty much everyone knows what to do with hypothermia. We’ll talk about the hypothermia first since it’s the simplest. At a minimum, everyone to lives in Northern Europe would know to bring him in by the fire, dry him off and wrap him up warm, and feed him hot soup as fast as he’ll drink it. A healer or a more motherly type might wrap his extremities in hot compresses and/or massage them to encourage circulation, especially in cases of obvious frostbite. If he were in a culture / country that resembles say, Finland or Russia, they might take him to a sauna if they have one nearby (there are a lot of saunas in Finland, it’s not a luxury of the rich, it’s a national pastime up there), which would do wonders for rewarming his whole body quickly, although because hypothermia and/or frostbite numbs your skin, he might not know if the steam is too hot, and so could incur burns that way.

[If you want to know more about frostbite, let me know and I’ll do a write-up on that too]

Now, drowning resuscitation:

If our boy still has a pulse, then the main thing he needs is rescue breaths and stimulation. A healer familiar with drownings might know something like the Heimlich maneuver (though they certainly wouldn’t call it that), and as I said above, they would know about giving the breath of life. So our boy would probably be given rescue breaths, perhaps stood up / picked up and shaken, or laid on his side and his back hammered on to encourage any airway obstructions to flow out of his mouth.

So, I hope that overly long and exhaustive answer was helpful!