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It is called the Heimlich maneuver – saving a choking victim with a bear hug and abdominal thrusts to eject a throat obstruction – and since its inception in 1974 it has become a national safety icon, taught in schools, portrayed in movies, displayed on restaurant posters and endorsed by medical authorities.

It is also the stuff of breathless, brink-of-death tales, told over the years by Ronald Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor, Goldie Hawn, Cher, Walter Matthau, Halle Berry, Carrie Fisher, Jack Lemmon, sportscaster Dick Vitale, television newsman John Chancellor and many others.

Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, the thoracic surgeon and medical maverick who developed and crusaded for the anti-choking technique that has been credited with saving an estimated 100,000 lives, died Saturday at Christ Hospital in Cincinnati after suffering a heart attack at his home Monday, his family said. He was 96 and lived in Cincinnati.

More than four decades after inventing his maneuver, Heimlich used it himself on May 23 to save the life of an 87-year-old woman choking on a morsel of meat at Deupree House, their senior residence in Cincinnati. He said it was the first time he had ever used the maneuver in an emergency, although he had made a similar claim in 2003.

Patty Ris, who had by chance sat at Heimlich's table in a dining hall, began eating a hamburger. "And the next thing I know, I could not breathe I was choking so hard," she said later. Recognizing her distress, Heimlich, 96, did his thing. "A piece of meat with a little bone attached flew out of her mouth," he recalled.

While best known for his namesake maneuver, Heimlich developed and held patents on a score of medical innovations and devices, including mechanical aids for chest surgery that were widely used in the Vietnam War, procedures for treating chronic lung disease and methods for helping stroke victims relearn to swallow. He also claimed to have invented a technique for replacing a damaged esophagus, but later acknowledged that a Romanian surgeon had been using it for years.

A professor of clinical sciences at Xavier University in Cincinnati and president of the Heimlich Institute, which he founded to research and promote his ideas, Heimlich was a media-savvy showman who entered the pantheon of medical history with his maneuver but in later years often found himself at odds with a medical establishment skeptical of his claims and theories.