What is a severed human head thinking? Everything you want to know about execution by beheading What happens if you cut off a person’s head

05.07.2023

The severed head bit the executioner

There are many different mystical stories about severed heads and decapitated torsos. It is difficult to figure out what is true and what is fiction. At all times, these stories attracted great attention from the public, because everyone mentally understood that his head without a body (and vice versa) would not live long, but I really wanted to believe the opposite... A terrible incident during an execution. For thousands of years, beheading was used as a type of death penalty. In medieval Europe, such an execution was considered “honorable”; the heads were cut off mainly for aristocrats. Simpler people faced the gallows or the fire. At that time, beheading with a sword, ax or an ax was a relatively painless and quick death, especially with the great experience of the executioner and the sharpness of his weapon.

In order for the executioner to try, the convict or his relatives paid him a lot of money, this was facilitated by the widely circulating terrible stories about a dull sword and an incompetent executioner who cut off the head of the unfortunate convict with only a few blows... For example, it is documented that in 1587, during the execution of the Scottish queen For Mary Stuart, the executioner needed three blows to deprive her of her head, and even then he had to resort to using a knife...

Even worse were the cases when non-professionals got down to business. In 1682, the French Count de Samozh was terribly unlucky - they could not get a real executioner for his execution. Two criminals agreed to perform his work in exchange for pardon. They were so frightened by such a responsible job and so worried about their future that they cut off the count’s head only on the 34th attempt!

Residents of medieval cities often became eyewitnesses to beheadings; for them, execution was something like a free performance, so many tried to take a place closer to the scaffold in advance in order to see such a nerve-wracking process in detail. Then such thrill-seekers, widening their eyes, whispered how the severed head grimaced or how its lips “managed to whisper the last goodbye.”

It was widely believed that the severed head still lived and saw for about ten seconds. That is why the executioner raised his severed head and showed it to those gathered in the city square; it was believed that the executed man in his last seconds saw a jubilant crowd, hooting and laughing at him.

I don’t know whether to believe it or not, but once in a book I read about a rather terrible incident that happened during one of the executions. Usually the executioner raised his head to show the crowd by the hair, but in this case the executed man was bald or shaved, in general, the hair on his brain container was completely absent, so the executioner decided to raise his head by the upper jaw and, without thinking twice, put his fingers into his slightly open mouth. Immediately the executioner screamed and his face was distorted by a grimace of pain, and no wonder, because the jaws of the severed head clenched... The already executed man managed to bite his executioner!

How does a severed head feel?

The French Revolution introduced beheadings to the masses by using “small mechanization” - the guillotine, invented at that time. Heads flew in such quantities that some inquisitive surgeon easily begged from the executioner for a whole basket of male and female “vessels of the mind” for his experiments. He tried to sew human heads to the bodies of dogs, but was a complete fiasco in this “revolutionary” endeavor.

At the same time, scientists began to be increasingly tormented by the question - what does a severed head feel and how long does it live after the fatal blow of the guillotine blade? Only in 1983, after a special medical study, scientists were able to answer the first half of the question. Their conclusion was this: despite the sharpness of the execution weapon, the skill of the executioner or the lightning speed of the guillotine, the person’s head (and probably the body!) experiences several seconds of severe pain.

Many naturalists of the 18th-19th centuries had no doubt that a severed head was capable of living for a very short time and, in some cases, even thinking. There is now an opinion that the final death of the head occurs a maximum of 60 seconds after execution.

In 1803, in Breslau, a young doctor Wendt, who later became a university professor, conducted a rather terrible experiment. On February 25, Wendt asked for the head of the executed murderer Troer for scientific purposes. He received his head from the hands of the executioner immediately after the execution. First of all, Wendt conducted experiments with the then popular electricity: when he applied a plate of a galvanic apparatus to the cut spinal cord, the face of the executed man was distorted by a grimace of suffering.

The inquisitive doctor did not stop there, he made a quick false movement, as if about to pierce Troer’s eyes with his fingers; they quickly closed, as if noticing the danger threatening them. Then Wendt shouted loudly in his ears a couple of times: “Troer!” With each of his screams, the head opened its eyes, clearly reacting to its name. Moreover, the head was recorded attempting to say something; it opened its mouth and moved its lips a little. I wouldn’t be surprised if Troer tried to send away such a disrespectful young man to death...

In the final part of the experiment, a finger was inserted into the head's mouth, while it clenched its teeth quite tightly, causing sensitive pain. For two whole minutes and 40 seconds the head served the purposes of science, after which its eyes finally closed and all signs of life faded away.

In 1905, Wendt's experiment was partially repeated by a French doctor. He also shouted his name to the head of the executed man, while the eyes of the severed head opened and the pupils focused on the doctor. The head reacted to its name twice in this way, and the third time its vital energy had already run out.

The body lives without a head!

If the head can live without a body for a short time, then the body can function for a short time without its “control center”! A unique case is known from history with Dietz von Schaunburg, executed in 1336. When King Ludwig of Bavaria sentenced von Schaunburg and his four Landsknechts to death for rebellion, the monarch, according to knightly tradition, asked the condemned man about his last wish. To the great amazement of the king, Schaunburg asked him to pardon those of his comrades whom he could run past without a head after execution.

Considering this request to be sheer nonsense, the king nevertheless promised to do it. Schaunburg himself arranged his friends in a row at a distance of eight steps from each other, after which he obediently knelt down and lowered his head on the block standing on the edge. The executioner's sword cut through the air with a whistle, the head literally bounced off the body, and then a miracle happened: Dietz's headless body jumped to its feet and... ran. It was able to run past all four landsknechts, taking more than 32 steps, and only after that it stopped and fell.

Both the convicts and those close to the king froze in horror for a short moment, and then everyone’s eyes turned to the monarch with a silent question, everyone was waiting for his decision. Although the stunned Ludwig of Bavaria was sure that the devil himself had helped Dietz escape, he still kept his word and pardoned the friends of the executed man.

Another striking incident occurred in 1528 in the city of Rodstadt. The unjustly convicted monk said that after the execution he would be able to prove his innocence, and asked not to touch his body for a few minutes. The executioner's ax blew off the condemned man's head, and three minutes later the headless body turned over, lay on its back, carefully crossing its arms over its chest. After this, the monk was posthumously declared innocent...

At the beginning of the 19th century, during the colonial war in India, the commander of B Company, 1st Yorkshire Line Regiment, Captain T. Mulven, was killed under extremely unusual circumstances. During the assault on Fort Amara, during hand-to-hand combat, Malven cut off the head of an enemy soldier with a saber. However, after this, the decapitated enemy managed to raise his rifle and shoot straight into the captain’s heart. Documentary evidence of this incident in the form of a report from Corporal R. Crickshaw was preserved in the archives of the British War Ministry.

A resident of the city of Tula, I. S. Koblatkin, reported to one of the newspapers about a shocking incident during the Great Patriotic War, of which he was an eyewitness: “We were raised to attack under artillery fire. The soldier ahead of me had his neck broken by a large fragment, so much so that his head literally hung behind his back like a terrible hood... Nevertheless, he continued to run before falling.”

The phenomenon of the missing brain

If there is no brain, then what coordinates the movements of a body left without a head? In medical practice, numerous cases have been described that make it possible to raise the question of some kind of revision of the role of the brain in human life. For example, the famous German brain specialist Hufland had to fundamentally change his previous views when he opened the skull of a patient suffering from paralysis. Instead of a brain, it contained a little more than 300 grams of water, but his patient had previously retained all his mental abilities and was no different from a person with a brain!

In 1935, a child was born at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York; his behavior was no different from ordinary babies; he ate, cried, and reacted to his mother in the same way. When he died 27 days later, an autopsy revealed that the baby had no brain at all...

In 1940, a 14-year-old boy was admitted to the clinic of the Bolivian doctor Nicola Ortiz who complained of terrible headaches. Doctors suspected a brain tumor. He could not be helped and died two weeks later. An autopsy showed that his entire skull was occupied by a giant tumor, which almost completely destroyed his brain. It turned out that the boy actually lived without a brain, but until his death he was not only conscious, but also retained sound thinking.

An equally sensational fact was presented in a report by doctors Jan Bruel and George Albee in 1957 to the American Psychological Association. They talked about their operation, during which the entire right hemisphere of the brain was completely removed from a 39-year-old patient. Their patient not only survived, but also fully retained his mental abilities, and they were above average.

The list of similar cases could be continued. Many people, after operations, head injuries, and terrible injuries, continued to live, move and think without a significant part of the brain. What helps them maintain a sound mind and, in some cases, even productivity?

Relatively recently, American scientists announced their discovery of a “third brain” in humans. In addition to the brain and spinal cord, they also discovered the so-called “abdominal brain,” represented by a collection of nervous tissue on the inside of the esophagus and stomach. According to Michael Gershon, a professor at a research center in New York, this “abdominal brain” has more than 100 million neurons, which is even more than in the spinal cord.

American researchers believe that it is the “abdominal brain” that gives the command to release hormones in case of danger, pushing a person to either fight or flee. According to scientists, this third “administrative center” remembers information, is able to accumulate life experience, and affects our mood and well-being. Maybe it is in the “abdominal brain” that the answer to the intelligent behavior of headless bodies lies?

Heads are still being cut off

Alas, no abdominal brain will allow one to live without a head, and they are still chopped down, even for princesses... It would seem that beheading, as a type of execution, has long since sunk into oblivion, but back in the first half of the 60s. In the 20th century, it was used in the GDR, then, in 1966, the only guillotine broke and criminals began to be shot.

But in the Middle East you can still quite officially lose your head.

In 1980, a documentary film by English cameraman Anthony Thomas, called “The Death of a Princess,” literally caused an international shock. It showed the public beheading of a Saudi princess and her lover. In 1995, a record 192 people were beheaded in Saudi Arabia. After this, the number of such executions began to decrease. In 1996, 29 men and one woman were beheaded in the kingdom.

In 1997, approximately 125 people were beheaded worldwide. At least as far back as 2005, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Qatar had laws allowing beheadings. It is reliably known that in Saudi Arabia a special executioner used his skills already in the new millennium.

As for criminal acts, Islamic extremists sometimes decapitate people. There have been cases where criminal gangs of Colombian drug lords did the same thing. In 2003, a certain extravagant British suicide became world famous, who deprived himself of his head using a self-built guillotine.

CHANCE FOR THE HEAD

One executioner, who carried out death sentences against French nobles at the end of the 18th century, said: “All executioners know very well that after cutting off heads live for another half an hour: they chew the bottom of the basket into which we throw them so much that this basket has to be changed at least once a month...

In the famous collection of the beginning of this century, “From the Realm of the Mysterious,” compiled by Grigory Dyachenko, there is a small chapter: “Life after cutting off the head.” Among other things, it notes the following: “It has already been said several times that a person, when his head is cut off, does not immediately stop living, but that his brain continues to think and his muscles move until, finally, the blood circulation stops completely and he will die completely...” Indeed, a head cut off from the body is capable of living for some time. Her facial muscles twitch and she grimaces in response to being pricked with sharp objects or having electric wires connected to her.

On February 25, 1803, a murderer named Troer was executed in Breslau. The young doctor Wendt, who later became a famous professor, asked for the head of the executed man to conduct scientific experiments with it. Immediately after the execution, having received the head from the hands of the executioner, he applied the zinc plate of the galvanic apparatus to one of the anterior cut muscles of the neck. A strong contraction of muscle fibers followed. Then Wendt began to irritate the cut spinal cord - an expression of suffering appeared on the face of the executed man. Then Doctor Wendt made a gesture, as if wanting to poke his fingers into the eyes of the executed man - they immediately closed, as if noticing the threatening danger. He then turned the severed head to face the sun and the eyes closed again. After this, a hearing test was done. Wendt shouted loudly in his ears twice: “Troer!” - and with each call, the head opened its eyes and directed them in the direction from which the sound came, and it opened its mouth several times, as if it wanted to say something. Finally, they put a finger in her mouth, and her head clenched her teeth so hard that the person putting the finger felt pain. And only after two minutes and forty seconds the eyes closed and life finally faded away in my head.

After the execution, life lingers for some time not only in the severed head, but also in the body itself. As historical chronicles testify, sometimes headless corpses in front of large crowds of people showed real miracles of balancing act!

In 1336, King Louis of Bavaria sentenced the nobleman Dean von Schaunburg and four of his Landsknechts to death because they dared to rebel against him and thereby, as the chronicle says, “disturbed the peace of the country.” The troublemakers, according to the custom of that time, had to cut off their heads.

Before his execution, according to knightly tradition, Louis of Bavaria asked Dean von Schaunburg what his last wish would be. The desire of a state criminal turned out to be somewhat unusual. Dean did not demand, as was “practice”, either wine or a woman, but asked the king to pardon the condemned Landsknechts if he ran past them after... his own execution. Moreover, so that the king would not suspect any trick, von Schaunburg specified that the condemned, including himself, would stand in a row at a distance of eight steps from each other, and only those whom he passed, having lost his head, would be pardoned. will be able to run. The monarch laughed loudly after listening to this nonsense, but promised to fulfill the wish of the doomed man.

The executioner's sword fell. Von Schaunburg's head rolled off his shoulders, and his body... jumped to his feet in front of the king and courtiers present at the execution, numb with horror, irrigating the ground with a stream of blood frantically gushing from the stump of his neck, and quickly rushed past the Landsknechts. Having passed the last one, that is, taking more than forty (!) steps, it stopped, twitched convulsively and fell to the ground.

The stunned king immediately concluded that there was a devil involved. However, he kept his word: the Landsknechts were pardoned.

Almost two hundred years later, in 1528, something similar happened in another German city - Rodstadt. Here they sentenced to beheading and burning the body at the stake a certain troublemaker monk, who with his supposedly abominable sermons embarrassed the law-abiding population. The monk denied his guilt and after his death promised to immediately provide irrefutable evidence of this. And indeed, after the executioner cut off the preacher’s head, his body fell with its chest onto the wooden platform and lay there motionless for three minutes. And then... then the incredible happened: the headless body turned over on its back, put its right leg on its left, crossed its arms over its chest, and only after that it froze completely. Naturally, after such a miracle, the Inquisition court pronounced an acquittal and the monk was duly buried in the city cemetery...

However, let's leave the headless bodies alone. Let us ask ourselves: do any thought processes occur in a severed human head? At the end of the last century, a journalist from the French newspaper Le Figaro, Michel Delin, tried to answer this rather complex question. This is how he describes an interesting hypnotic experiment conducted by the famous Belgian artist Wirtz over the head of a guillotined robber. “The artist has long been interested in the question: how long does the execution procedure last for the criminal himself and what feeling does the defendant experience in the last minutes of his life, what exactly does the head, separated from the body, think and feel, and in general, whether it can think and feel. Wirtz was well acquainted with the doctor of the Brussels prison, whose friend, Dr. D., had been practicing hypnotism for thirty years. The artist told him his strong desire to be told that he was a criminal condemned to the guillotine. On the day of the execution, ten minutes before the criminal was brought in, Wirtz, Dr. D. and two witnesses placed themselves at the bottom of the scaffold so that they were not visible to the public and in sight of the basket into which the head of the executed man was to fall. Dr. D. put his medium to sleep by inducing him to identify with the criminal, to monitor all his thoughts and feelings and to loudly express the thoughts of the condemned man at the moment when the ax touched his neck. Finally, he ordered him to penetrate the brain of the executed person, as soon as the head was separated from the body, and analyze the last thoughts of the deceased. Wirtz immediately fell asleep. A minute later, footsteps were heard: it was the executioner leading the criminal. He was placed on the scaffold under the ax of the guillotine. Then Wirtz, shuddering, began to beg to be woken up, since the horror he was experiencing was unbearable. But it's too late. The ax falls. “What do you feel, what do you see?” asks the doctor. Wirtz writhes in convulsions and answers with a groan: “Lightning strike! Oh, terrible! She thinks, she sees...” - “Who thinks, who sees?” - “Head ... She is suffering terribly... She feels, thinks, she does not understand what happened... She is looking for her body... it seems to her that the body will come for her... She is waiting for the final blow - death, but death does not come..." While Wirtz said These terrible words, witnesses to the described scene looked at the head of the executed man, with hanging hair, clenched eyes and mouth. The arteries were still pulsating where the ax had cut them. Blood covered his face.

The doctor kept asking, “What do you see, where are you?” - “I’m flying away into immeasurable space... Am I really dead? Is it really over? Oh, if only I could connect with my body! People, have mercy on my body! People, have mercy on me, give me my body! Then I will live... I still think, I feel, I remember everything... Here are my judges in red robes... My unfortunate wife, my poor child! No, no, you don’t love me anymore, you are leaving me... If you wanted to unite me with the body, I could still live among you... No, you don’t want to... When will this all end? Is the sinner condemned to eternal torment? At these words of Wirtz, it seemed to those present that the eyes of the executed man opened wide and looked at them with an expression of inexpressible torment and supplication. The artist continued: “No, no! Suffering cannot continue forever. The Lord is merciful... Everything earthly leaves my eyes... In the distance I see a star, shining like a diamond... Oh, how good it must be up there! Some kind of wave covers my entire being. How soundly I will sleep now... Oh, what bliss!..." These were the last words of the hypnotic. Now he was fast asleep and no longer answered the doctor’s questions. Doctor D. went up to the head of the executed man and felt his forehead, temples, teeth... Everything was cold as ice, the head was dead.”

In 1902, the famous Russian physiologist Professor A. A. Kulyabko, after successfully reviving the child’s heart, tried to revive... the head. True, for starters, just fish. A special liquid, a blood substitute, was passed through the blood vessels into the neatly cut off head of the fish. The result exceeded the wildest expectations: the fish head moved its eyes and fins, opened and closed its mouth, thereby showing all the signs that life continues in it.

Kulyabko's experiments allowed his followers to advance even further in the field of head revitalization. In 1928 in Moscow, physiologists S.S. Bryukhonenko and S.I. Chechulin demonstrated a living dog’s head. Connected to a heart-lung machine, she in no way resembled a dead stuffed animal. When a cotton wool soaked in acid was placed on the tongue of this head, all the signs of a negative reaction were revealed: grimaces, slurping, and an attempt to throw the cotton wool away. When putting sausage into the mouth, the head was licked. If a stream of air was directed onto the eye, a blinking reaction could be observed.

In 1959, the Soviet surgeon V.P. Demikhov repeatedly conducted successful experiments with severed dog heads, claiming that it was quite possible to maintain life in a human head.
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Does the brain continue to live and perceive the world around us for a few minutes after the head instantly flies off the shoulders, as, for example, in the guillotine?

Wednesday marked 125 years since the last execution by beheading in Denmark, bringing with it a creepy question from a reader: Does a person die instantly when their head is cut off?

“I just once heard that the brain dies from loss of blood only a few minutes after cutting off the head, that is, people executed, for example, by the guillotine, in principle could “see” and “hear” their surroundings, although they were already dead. Is this true? - asks Anette.

The thought of seeing your own headless body in anyone will make you shudder, and in fact this question arose several hundred years ago, when the guillotine began to be used as a humane method of execution after the French Revolution.

The severed head turned red

The revolution was a real bloodbath, during which 14 thousand heads were cut off from March 1793 to August 1794.

And it was then that the question that interested our reader was first raised - this happened in connection with the execution by guillotine of Charlotte Corday, the woman who killed the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, sentenced to death.

After the execution, rumors spread that when one of the revolutionaries took her severed head out of the basket and slapped her in the face, her face was distorted with anger. There were those who claimed that they saw her blush from the insult.

But could this really happen?

The brain can live a little

“She couldn’t blush anyway, because that requires blood pressure,” says animal physiology professor Tobias Wang of Aarhus University, where he studies circulation and metabolism, among other things.

Nevertheless, he cannot decisively exclude that after cutting off her head she was still conscious for some time.

“The thing with our brain is that its mass makes up only 2% of the entire body, while it consumes about 20% of energy. The brain itself does not have a glycogen reserve (energy depot - Videnskab), so as soon as the blood supply stops, it immediately ends up in the hands of God, so to speak.”

In other words, the question is how long the brain has enough energy, and the professor wouldn't be surprised if it lasted at least a couple of seconds.

If we turn to his domain of zoology, there is at least one species of animal that is known to have a head that can continue to live without a body: reptiles.

Severed turtle heads can live for several more days

On YouTube, for example, you can find terrifying videos where the heads of snakes without a body quickly snap their mouths, ready to bite into the victim with their long poisonous teeth.

This is possible because reptiles have a very slow metabolism, so if the head is intact, their brain can continue to live.

“Turtles especially stand out,” says Tobias Wang, who tells of a colleague who had to use turtle brains for experiments and put the severed heads in the refrigerator, assuming they would, of course, die there.

“But they lived for another two or three days,” says Tobias Wang, adding that this, like the guillotine question, raises an ethical dilemma.

“From an animal ethics perspective, the fact that turtle heads do not die immediately after being separated from the body may be a problem.”

“When we need a turtle’s brain, and it must not contain any anesthetics, we put the head in liquid nitrogen, and then it dies instantly,” the scientist explains.

Lavoisier winked from the basket

Returning to us people, Tobias Wang told the famous story about the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was executed by guillotine on May 8, 1794.

“Being one of the greatest scientists in history, he asked his good friend, the mathematician Lagrange, to count how many times he winked after his head was cut off.”

Thus Lavoisier was about to make his final contribution to science by trying to help answer the question of whether a person remains conscious after cutting off his head.

He was going to blink once per second, and, according to some stories, blinked 10 times, and according to others - 30 times, but all this, as Tobias Vand says, unfortunately, is still a myth.

According to science historian William B. Jensen of the University of Cincinnati in the US, the wink is not mentioned in any of the accepted biographies of Lavoisier, which, however, says that Lagrange was present at the execution, but was in the corner of the square - too far away to perform your part of the experiment.

The severed head looked at the doctor

The guillotine was introduced as a symbol of a new, humanistic order in society. Therefore, rumors about Charlotte Corday and others were completely inappropriate and gave rise to lively scientific debates among doctors in France, England and Germany.

The question was never satisfactorily answered and was raised again and again until 1905, when one of the most convincing experiments was carried out on human heads.

Context

Why are North Korea so fond of brutal executions?

Foreign Policy 05/14/2015

Syria: US wards execute teenager

Aftenposten 07/21/2016

US confirms Islamists beheaded reporter

BBC Russian Service 08/20/2014

Is the death penalty necessary?

Gezitter.org 01/27/2015 This experiment was described by the French doctor Beaurieux, who conducted it with the head of Henri Languille, sentenced to death.

As Borjo describes it, immediately after the guillotine he noted that Langille's lips and eyes moved spasmodically for 5-6 seconds, after which the movement stopped. And when Doctor Borjo loudly shouted “Langille!” a couple of seconds later, the eyes opened, the pupils focused and looked intently at the doctor, as if he had woken the man from sleep.

“I saw undoubtedly living eyes looking at me,” writes Borjo.

After this, the eyelids drooped, but the doctor again managed to wake up the convict’s head by shouting his name, and only on the third attempt nothing happened.

Not minutes, but seconds

This account is not a scientific report in the modern sense, and Tobias Wang doubts that a person can really remain conscious for that long.

“I believe a couple of seconds is really possible,” he says, and explains that reflexes and muscle contractions may remain, but the brain itself suffers enormous blood loss and goes into a coma, so that the person quickly loses consciousness.

This assessment is supported by a tried-and-true rule known to cardiologists, which states that when the heart stops, the brain remains conscious for up to four seconds if a person is standing, up to eight seconds if he is sitting, and up to 12 seconds if he is lying down.

As a result, we have not really clarified whether the head can retain consciousness after being cut off from the body: minutes, of course, are excluded, but the version of seconds does not seem incredible.

And if you count: one, two, three, you can easily see that this is enough to realize your surroundings, which means that this method of execution has nothing to do with humanity.

The guillotine has become a symbol of a new, humane society

The French guillotine had great symbolic significance in the new republic after the revolution, where it was introduced as a new, humane way of carrying out the death sentence.

According to Danish historian Inga Floto, who wrote the book A Cultural History of the Death Penalty (2001), the guillotine became a tool that showed “how the new regime’s humane attitude toward the death penalty contrasted with the barbarity of the previous regime.”

It is no coincidence that the guillotine appears as a formidable mechanism with a clear and simple geometry, which emanates rationality and efficiency.

The guillotine was named after the physician Joseph Guillotin (J.I. Guillotin), who, after the French Revolution, became famous and extolled for proposing a reform of the penal system, making the law equal for all and punishing criminals equally regardless of their status.

In addition, Guillotin argued that execution should be carried out humanely so that the victim suffered minimal pain, in contrast to the brutal practice of the times when an executioner with an ax or sword often had to strike several times before he could separate the head from the body.

When, in 1791, the French National Assembly, after long debates about whether to abolish the death penalty altogether, decided instead that “the death penalty should be limited to the simple taking of life without any torture of the convicted person,” Guillotin’s ideas were adopted.

This led to earlier forms of "falling blade" instruments being refined into the guillotine, which thus became a significant symbol of the new social order.

The guillotine was abolished in 1981

The guillotine remained the only instrument of execution in France until the abolition of the death penalty in 1981 (!). Public executions were abolished in France in 1939.

Latest executions in Denmark

In 1882, Anders Nielsen Sjællænder, a farm worker on the island of Lolland, was sentenced to death for murder.

On November 22, 1882, the only executioner in the country, Jens Sejstrup, swung an ax.

The execution caused a great stir in the press - especially because Seistrup had to be hit with an ax several times before his head was separated from his body.

Anders Schelländer became the last person to be publicly executed in Denmark.

The next execution took place behind closed doors at Horsens prison. The death penalty in Denmark was abolished in 1933.

Soviet scientists transplanted dog heads

If you can handle a little more horrifying and spine-chilling scientific experimentation, watch this video that shows Soviet experiments simulating the reverse situation: severed dogs' heads are kept alive using artificial blood supply.

The video was presented by British biologist JBS Haldane, who said that he himself had conducted several similar experiments.

Doubts arose whether the video was propaganda exaggerating the achievements of Soviet scientists. Nevertheless, it is a generally accepted fact that Russian scientists were pioneers in the field of organ transplantation, including transplanting the heads of dogs.

These experiences inspired South African doctor Christiaan Barnard, who earned worldwide fame by performing the world's first heart transplant.

We thank our reader for her question and are sending her a Videnskab.dk T-shirt as a reward. We also thank our expert Tobias Wang for helping us shed some light on this daunting topic. If you want to ask a question to science yourself, send it here: [email protected].

InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively from foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.

A terrible incident during an execution

For thousands of years, beheading has been used as a form of capital punishment. In medieval Europe, such an execution was considered “honorable”; the heads were cut off mainly for aristocrats; simpler people faced the gallows or the fire. At that time, beheading with a sword, ax or an ax was a relatively painless and quick death, especially with the great experience of the executioner and the sharpness of his weapon.

Residents of medieval cities often became eyewitnesses to beheadings; for them, execution was something like a free performance, so many tried to take a place closer to the scaffold in advance in order to see such a nerve-wracking process in detail. Then such thrill-seekers, widening their eyes, whispered about how the severed head grimaced or how its lips managed to whisper the last goodbye.

How does a severed head feel?

The body lives without a head!

The phenomenon of the missing brain

In 1940, a 14-year-old boy was admitted to the clinic of the Bolivian doctor Nicola Ortiz, who complained of terrible headaches. Doctors suspected a brain tumor. He could not be helped and died two weeks later. An autopsy showed that his entire skull was occupied by a giant tumor, which almost completely destroyed his brain. It turned out that the boy actually lived without a brain, but until his death he was not only conscious, but also retained sound thinking.

Heads are still being cut off

Alas, no abdominal brain will allow one to live without a head, and they are still chopped down, even for princesses... It would seem that beheading, as a type of execution, has long sunk into oblivion, but back in the first half of the 60s. In the 20th century, it was used in the GDR, then, in 1966, the only guillotine broke and criminals began to be shot.

But in the Middle East you can still quite officially lose your head.

As for criminal acts, Islamic extremists sometimes decapitate people; there have been cases where criminal gangs of Colombian drug lords did the same thing. In 2003, a certain extravagant British suicide became world famous, who deprived himself of his head using a self-built guillotine.

Many centuries ago, executions of the most notorious criminals were carried out in public. Usually this action took place in one of the central squares of the city. It was attended not only by the accusers, victims and relatives of the convicted person, but also by a whole crowd of onlookers. Execution was something of a mass entertainment, similar to gladiatorial battles in Ancient Rome.
Long before the start, people gathered around the scaffold and shared opinions, anticipating a bloody and exciting “show.” Some treated the convict with sympathy, others with malice and hatred. Everything depended on the nature of the crime committed and the range of emotions that the criminal evoked among the masses.
In view of such publicity, it was important for many convicts not to lose their dignity in the face of hundreds of acquaintances and strangers. First of all, this concerned persons of noble birth. It was extremely important for them to “save face” in front of the crowd of commoners, so that they would not have the opportunity to mock the last sufferings of a high-born person. Because of this, since ancient times there has been a division into “noble” and “ignoble” executions.

Die with dignity

The very fact of imminent and inevitable death put the vast majority of convicts into a stupor or uncontrollable panic. Feeling the approach of the end, sometimes even the most noble and strong-willed criminals lost self-control: they began to sob and beg for mercy. In such an environment of extreme tension, a person wanted to die, at least quickly and without shameful death convulsions.
And they were common during hangings, which were considered the execution of the poor. The sight of a suicide bomber being hanged is not for the faint of heart. The body dangles in a noose, the limbs twitch. The first rows of “spectators” hear the crunch of a breaking spine and the wheezing of a dying man. This picture is completed by the involuntary defecation of a person in agony.
Aristocrats could not afford such a shameful death. They left hanging to the poor and inveterate repeat offenders, burning to witches, quartering and other terrible forms of execution to traitors to their overlords. Kings and lords in the Middle Ages were executed by beheading with a sword. In extreme cases - an ax. Later, the guillotine appeared, equalizing the rights of kings and mobs.
The sword for aristocrats was not chosen by chance. Most of them were warriors, so they wanted to fall from weapons “befitting” their rank. Not only aristocratic men, but also women were beheaded with a sword. This is how Anne Boleyn, queen and beloved wife of the monarch “Bluebeard” Henry VIII Tudor, ended her days in 1536.

"Easy" death

The second important factor that determined the “privilege” of beheading was the speed of such death. During hanging, a person could die from a few seconds to 1-2 minutes. If the spine broke under the weight of the body, the condemned person passed out almost immediately. Otherwise, he had to suffocate painfully for a couple of minutes, which seemed endlessly long to both the dying man himself and the spectators present at the execution.
In contrast to such monstrous torments, beheading was considered a relatively quick and easy death. An experienced executioner cut off the head with one blow. The victim sometimes did not even have time to catch the moment when the sword touched the neck. Death was instant. The condemned person himself or his relatives paid the executioner in gold so that the work was done efficiently.
However, there were also mistakes if the executioner was not particularly experienced or on the eve of the execution he “drank too much.” An example is the punishment of Thomas Cromwell, chancellor and closest adviser to the same Henry VIII, who was known for his love of public reprisals against ideological opponents and annoying wives.
Cromwell was initially sentenced to be burned. The king then “mercifully” replaced this type of execution with beheading. In 1540, Cromwell ascended the scaffold. His hopes of dying were quickly dashed by the first blow of the axe. The executioner failed to complete the mission entrusted to him and was unable to kill the criminal immediately.
The number of swings of the ax is not recorded in historical documents, but it is certain that there were several of them. The execution was terribly long and painful. Thomas Cromwell, who faithfully served Henry for many years, experienced all the torments of hell while still on earth. Later, chronicler Edward Hall wrote that the chancellor bravely endured the execution of the executioner, who “did not do his job in a divine manner.”
There is a legend that the executioner was deliberately drunk the day before. After drinking, he was unable to cut off Cromwell’s head with one blow with a trembling hand. So the ideological opponents of the chancellor - or even the king himself - got even with the daring reformer for his views and influence remaining in the past.