The Assembly laughed, and while the doctor had not designed the guillotine, the device would forever bear his name. “With my machine, I’ll have your head off in the blink of an eye, and you will suffer not at all”. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin announced to the National Assembly of France 116 years earlier. “The blade hisses, the head falls, blood spurts, the man exists no more,” Dr. Beaurieux’s experiment was merely one in a long line of fierce arguments and counter-arguments that raged within the European medical community for generations: Do decapitated heads retain consciousness? To his astonishment, the eyes lifted and “…fixed in a precise fashion on mind and the pupils adjusted… I had the impression that living eyes were looking at me”. “Languille!” he called out the criminal’s name. Curious at the head’s twitching eyes and spasming lips, the doctor performed a morbid experiment. Jacques Beaurieux witnessed the execution of a condemned criminal by guillotine. Two generations earlier, on the 28th of June, 1905, Dr. It was a grim fate for the condemned, and for decades, rumors had persisted that it was an even crueler death than it seemed. In his 1957 essay on capital punishment, Réflexions sur la guillotine, the French philosopher Albert Camus described the guillotine thusly: “…under a night sky, one of the executioners will finally seize you by the seat of your pants and throw you horizontally on a board while another will steady your head in the lunette and a third will let fall from a height of seven feet a hundred-and-twenty-pound blade that will slice off your head like a razor”.
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