Thank you for writing and sending this....very interesting;

Re: MGGA

https://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=241796

Introduction and background.

For over 200 years, the guillotine of the French Revolution has been a subject of fascination and terror. Made infamous by novels such as A Tale of Two Cities, the guillotine today is a symbol of oppression and death. As thousands perished beneath its blade, rumors soon spread that those unlucky enough to be beheaded by the device did not experience the painless, instantaneous death that the revolutionary government promised - and that the condemned continued to display signs of life and awareness even after they had been decapitated. This fear became a source of great controversy for the physicians of the day, and the debate has even continued to the modern age - though the debate is now centered on animal models for medical experimentation rather than humans.

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” [1]. It was a grim fate for the condemned, and for decades, rumors had persisted that it was an even crueler death than it seemed. Two generations earlier, on the 28th of June, 1905, Dr. Jacques Beaurieux witnessed the execution of a condemned criminal by guillotine. Curious at the head’s twitching eyes and spasming lips, the doctor performed a morbid experiment. “Languille!” he called out the criminal’s name. 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” [2]. 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?

“The blade hisses, the head falls, blood spurts, the man exists no more,” Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin announced to the National Assembly of France 116 years earlier. “With my machine, I’ll have your head off in the blink of an eye, and you will suffer not at all” [2]. The Assembly laughed, and while the doctor had not designed the guillotine, the device would forever bear his name [3]. Before this, beheading, typically a death reserved for nobles while hanging was reserved for commoners [2], was a brutal business. Even the most skilled of executioners could botch a beheading, as seen by the unfortunate death of Mary Queen of Scots, who required two blows to be beheaded [4]. One executioner reminded the National Assembly of the Duc de Lally, whose beheading via sword was even more gruesome - he required so many blows that he eventually had to be flipped onto his back to fully sever the head from the body. If many executions were necessary, the use of a sword or axe became even worse, as it was “…absolutely necessary that [the blade] be sharpened again” after each death [2]. The guillotine offered a useful way to circumvent this - with the “mechanization of punishment”, the regime could deliver a humane, egalitarian punishment that did not cause unnecessary pain or torment, did not distinguish between noble and commoner, and could execute up to 20 people per hour [2]. By 1792, the National Assembly voted the guillotine, “the most gentle of lethal methods,” into law [3].

The argument for retained consciousness

It did not take long for the assumption that the guillotine provided painless, instantaneous death to come under challenge. On July 17, 1793, Charlotte Corday was executed via guillotine in front of a curious crowd. Much to the astonishment of the spectators, when the executioner raised up her head and allowed observers to slap it, the cheeks reddened as though she was blushing in indignation. By 1795, physicians such as Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring began to argue that perception may persist in the brain after decapitation - far from being the merciful execution that rendered commoner and noble equal in death, the guillotine was an agonizing torture [3]. Dr. Sömmerring, writing of severed heads grinding their teeth and of facial muscles twitching, speculated that “if air still circulated through the organs of the voice… the heads would speak” [2]. Acting on Sömmerring’s theories, Dr. Heinrich von Leveling conducted several experiments on guillotined victims, mechanically irritating the exposed spinal cord to elucidate grimaces from the beheaded face [3]. Although Sömmerring admitted to regretting his part in these experiments later, he eventually estimated that the “life force” present in the heads lasted for up to 15 minutes, an estimate he obtained from the “retention of heat” in the head [3]. In the 1795 publication Opinion on the punishment meted out by the guillotine and the pain that continues after severance, Dr. Jean-Joseph Sue agreed that, from the example of chickens or butterflies that continue to move after decapitation, it is logical to assume that humans retain a torturous awareness after being guillotined, even if only for a moment, such a torture would be “incalculably long” for the victim. He suggested drowning as a possible alternative.

In fact, physicians had investigated the possibility of retained consciousness in severed heads even before the revolutionary government officially adopted the guillotine. In 1791, German physicians used electrical probes to evoke “grotesque grimaces” from the severed heads of decapitated criminals, raising the alarming possibility that consciousness possibly persisted after execution [5]. Even in June 1956, Doctors Fournier and Piedelièvre reported to the French Academy of Medicine that death via guillotine “is not immediate… every vital element survives decapitation. The doctor is left with this impression of a horrible experience, of a murderous vivisection, followed by a premature burial” [1]. In a similar vein, Camus tells of Father Devoyod, a chaplain at the infamous Santé Prison who often dealt with the condemned during the mid-20th century. Devoyod recounted one case where, following one execution, he “could see the condemned man’s eyes fixed on me with a look of supplication, as if to ask forgiveness. Instinctively we made the sign of the cross to bless the head, and then the lids blinked, the expression of the eyes softened, and finally the look, that had remained full of expression, became vague”

Continued at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9930870/

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Fox.