Bring back "The Guillotine" and the living head...interesting read.

bcbadgalz · #1 04-26-2006, 06:16 PM

Met a few people today at work that need it. If the head and brain are absolutely useless, why not cut it off ?

Living heads
From its first use, there has been debate as to whether the guillotine always provided as swift a death as Dr. Guillotin hoped. With previous methods of execution, there was little concern about the suffering inflicted. But where the guillotine was invented specifically to be "humane," the issue was seriously considered. Furthermore, there is the possibility that the very swiftness of the guillotine only prolonged the victim's suffering. The blade cuts quickly enough that there is relatively little impact on the brain case, and perhaps less likelihood of immediate unconsciousness than with a more violent decapitation.

Audiences to guillotinings told numerous stories of blinking eyelids, moving eyes, movement of the mouth, even an expression of "unequivocal indignation" on the face of the decapitated Charlotte Corday when her cheek was slapped.

Anatomists and other scientists in several countries have tried to perform more definitive experiments on severed human heads as recently as 1956. Inevitably the evidence is only anecdotal. What appears to be a head responding to the sound of its name, or to the pain of a pinprick, may be only random muscle twitching or automatic reflex action, with no awareness involved. At worst, it seems that the massive drop in cerebral blood pressure would cause a victim to lose consciousness in 5-10 seconds.

For the history of the mechanism look here, it's fantastic !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine