Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

  The guillotine killed so quickly that the mysterious instant of death appeared magnified in the imaginations of those who watched. What happened in that infinitesimal moment? Maybe the guillotine made death look instantaneous when in fact it was not. The machine seemed too efficient to be true. And if a person’s demise could not, in fact, be so quick, then the guillotine might make it knowable. The head without its body might understand its own fate and become, in the words of historian Daniel Arasse, the unspeakable monster who utters, ‘I think, but I am not’, the Cartesian cogito cut in half.

  During the Revolution, rumours spread of guillotined heads that lived on without their bodies. When the severed heads of two rival members of the National Assembly were placed in the same sack by the executioner, it was said that one bit the other so fiercely it was impossible to separate them. Another popular story related to Charlotte Corday d’Armont, who was guillotined for the murder of Marat on 17 July 1793. When the executioner held her head aloft to the crowd and slapped it, both her cheeks reddened and she showed her fury: ‘Who did not see Charlotte Corday’s face blush with indignation when the detestable executioner, who held in his hand that calm and beautiful head, gave it a slap?’ one medic commented.

  There were countless tales of winking eyes, grinding teeth, moving lips and heads that were restless in the basket. And some of them were true. Severed heads were capable of movement; the question was, what did the movement mean? If a severed head moved, could it be said to be alive? And if so, was it capable of experiencing its own monstrous fate? It was unclear whether these movements were evidence of the human will striving to assert itself to the last, or nothing more than complex physiological processes still at work in the corpse. Numerous doctors in France, Italy and Germany took the matter into their own hands.

  One was the French professor of anatomy Dr Séguret, who found that when he opened the eyelids of a severed head and held it up to the sun, ‘The eyelids promptly closed of their own accord, with an aliveness that was both abrupt and startling. The entire face then assumed an expression of intense suffering.’ When his student pricked the lolling tongue of another head with a lancet it withdrew and the face grimaced as though in pain. Séguret’s team reported that one guillotined victim, an assassin named Terier, turned his eyes in the direction of a man who was speaking more than fifteen minutes after his decapitation. Meanwhile, in Italy, scientists observed that every time they sank a scalpel into the soft tissues of the forehead of one severed head, the facial muscles contracted.

  Despite their commitment to the cause, the doctors who studied these severed heads could not agree. Some scientists recorded facial movements, but others did not. A team in Mainz was determined to solve the question once and for all in November 1803. Two students waited in position directly beneath the scaffold to check for evidence of consciousness immediately after decapitation. One held the fallen head firmly and watched the face while the other shouted ‘Do you hear me?’ in the ears. Alternating tasks, they did this with seven heads. No response of any kind was observed. The team concluded that the loss of consciousness was virtually instantaneous and irrevocable upon decapitation. Georges Martin, an assistant executioner in Paris who had witnessed some 120 beheadings, was interviewed on the subject and said that he, too, believed death was instantaneous. In the seconds after death, he explained, the eyes were fixed, the eyelids immobile and the lips white.

  Doctors from the Medical Association of Mainz examine a severed head under the scaffold at a public execution in 1803.

  Still, it was impossible to know for sure, and the grimaces and winks of countless bodiless heads suggested otherwise. In 1836 the infamous murderer Pierre-Francois Lacenaire, who provided the inspiration for Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, agreed to help prove the survival of consciousness after decapitation. Lacenaire promised Dr Lelut at the prison hospital, Bicêtre, that he would close his left eye and leave his right open after his execution. Lelut observed Lacenaire’s head for some time after his execution; he waited and waited, but nothing happened. The problem was that neither movement nor its absence proved that the head was conscious after decapitation. It was perfectly possible that those heads that moved did not feel anything, since movement alone did not demonstrate that the head was aware or alert to its surroundings. Equally, those heads that did not move might still be conscious but simply immobilized and unable to express their suffering.

  The fact that nobody could be sure, since the evidence was not really evidence at all, did nothing to quell the enthusiasm of those who busied themselves with the corpses of decapitated criminals. Scientists were still trying to elicit some kind of response from severed heads at the end of the nineteenth century by pinching, prodding, burning and cutting heads in the minutes after death. Brushes steeped in ammonia were inserted into nostrils, lit candles were held up to eyeballs, names were shouted in ears, but no conclusive evidence emerged.

  In the late nineteenth century, a few determined scientists became bolder in their experiments. Prodding and poking a severed head was one thing, but what about trying to sustain the life of a person’s head by giving it a fresh supply of blood? Two French doctors addressed this question in the 1880s. Jean Baptiste Vincent Laborde tried to resuscitate severed heads with blood and trigger the nervous system by drilling holes through the skull and inserting needles into the brain. On one occasion he managed to connect the arteries on one side of a human neck to a living dog and he was able to note that the muscles in the eyelids, forehead and jaw contracted. At one point, Laborde recorded, the man’s jaw snapped shut loudly. Dr Dassy de Lignières also pumped blood from a living dog through the head of a guillotined man. According to Lignières, the face reddened, the lips swelled and coloured and the features sharpened. For about two seconds the lips stammered slightly, the eyelids twitched and worked, and ‘the whole face wakened into an expression of shocked amazement’. ‘I affirm,’ wrote the doctor, although of course he could not, ‘that during two seconds the brain thought.’

  These experiments convinced Lignières of the ‘torture’ of the guillotine. ‘When the knife has done its work,’ he wrote, ‘when the head has rolled into the sawdust … this head, separated from its body, hears the voices of the crowd. The decapitated victim feels himself dying in the basket. He sees the guillotine and the light of day.’ Lignières helpfully suggested that the executioner should immediately shake each head in the air, to ensure that the blood flowed out and reduce the condemned person’s suffering.

  Despite all these investigations, the insistent presence of the guillotine, and the twitching heads it left behind, kept doctors divided on the issue of whether a severed head could suffer or not. In the end, it did not really matter what had been observed by scientists during their experiments, because everyone agreed that heads and bodies could continue to move and react after death. What’s more, Galvani’s experiments had shown that dismembered body parts could continue to respond to physical stimuli, and it was also generally agreed that the brain could receive sensations from amputated limbs, and therefore, perhaps, the brain could continue to feel an entire amputated body.

  The problem was how to interpret the movements that body parts made after decapitation. Three medics, Samuel Thomas Soemmerring, Jean Joseph Sue and Charles Ernest Oelsner, led the arguments against the guillotine on the grounds of cruelty in the late eighteenth century. They insisted that severed heads could suffer, and for this reason they believed the guillotine to be more brutal than death by hanging, or, for that matter, death by asphyxiation or poison, which, as survivors had attested, felt more like falling asleep. The guillotine, in contrast, was so fast and so bloody, they believed that it must be more painful than other methods of execution. Each of these men had different ideas about the body’s response to decapitation, but they all agreed that sensibility could continue in severed heads, even after movements had ceased. The brain, they believed, went on functioning even when there was no b
lood flowing to it any more. Soemmerring wrote that ‘feeling, personality, and sense of self remain for some time’, so that people felt pain from the fatal blow to their neck. He was sure that if air could still flow through the vocal cords, severed heads would speak. It was because a person’s head was ‘thick and round’, Soemmerring claimed, that it retained more heat than other body parts, and therefore feeling could persist within it for a full fifteen minutes.

  The implications of these ideas were horrific. Victims could experience their own violent death, trapped in an excruciating limbo, neither completely dead nor fully alive. And fifteen minutes must feel like a lifetime if you are a severed head contemplating its certain fate. Far from being the efficient, humane killing machine that it was designed to be, perhaps the guillotine performed unspeakable acts of torture, both physical and mental, upon its victims. Sue argued that guillotined heads were not only able to feel their fate, they could also think about it, raising the question, ‘What could be more horrible than the perception of one’s own execution, followed by the after-thought of one’s having been executed?’

  Most of the debate about ‘life after decapitation’ concerned the head, rather than the body. Interestingly, only Sue believed that life continued in the body as well as in the head, a proposition which implied that the soul or will was not uniquely carried in the brain, nor unitary in nature. Sue thought that there were three ‘life forces’ – moral, intellectual and animal – which, although unified in the head, could exist independently for a short while when something catastrophic, like decapitation, had taken place. Part of the horror of the guillotine, for Sue, was its role in brutally separating these three forces during the moments of death.

  Other doctors, without conclusive evidence, thought the guillotine was the best of a bad bunch. The death penalty was deplorable to some, but if it was going to happen, better that it was courtesy of this machine. A French physician and philosopher named Pierre Jean George Cabanis supported the theory that victims of the guillotine did not suffer because there was not enough time for them to do so. Cabanis referred to evidence from men who had been wounded in battle but had felt no pain in the immediate aftermath. He argued that if wounded soldiers experienced no pain in the moments after they were injured, then the split-second slice of the guillotine blade certainly could not hurt. Far from amplifying any discomfort, the speed of the cut ensured that the pain of death was minimized. Cabanis pointed out that the nape of the neck is the place where animals and humans can be killed instantly (although others disagreed, arguing that the profusion of nerves in that region meant that death by the guillotine was a particularly torturous way to die).

  Turning his attention to the worrying twitches seen in severed heads and bodies, Cabanis referred to paralysis cases, which proved that muscular movement was possible without sensation. These examples backed up Cabanis’s theory that the rolling eyes and chattering teeth seen in severed heads were purely mechanical movements, without any associated feeling. He speculated that consciousness required a physical connection between the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Rather than being localized in any one body part, such as the brain, consciousness depended on the unity of the whole body. As soon as this unity was destroyed, by cutting through the spinal cord, consciousness ceased. In this sense, all personality and sensation was eradicated at the moment of decapitation, when the spinal cord itself was severed and the unity of the body shattered. Certainly, according to Cabanis, the conscious severed head was an impossibility and little more than a figment of the imagination. While he acknowledged that the fall of the blade did not necessarily mark an immediate end to life, since some biological function could persist, he argued that the end of conscious suffering was immediate.

  There was a distinctly political undertone to these medical and philosophical debates. Those, like Soemmerring, who believed that victims of the guillotine suffered a torturous fate were quicker to criticize the barbarism of the Republic as a whole. Oelsner called the mob who watched their fellow men die by the blade in Paris a ‘rabble of cannibals’: such desperate and despicable measures, he felt, would not be necessary in a well-ordered state. The chaos inflicted on the individual by decapitation was reminiscent of the chaos that had resulted from the breakdown of social order thanks to the Revolution. Cabanis was no devotee of the Republic either, but he had republican inclinations which coloured his judgement when it came to defining the proper role of the ‘head’ over the body (or the state). For Cabanis, the head and the body were equals – each was nothing without the other.

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  The guillotine put the moment of death centre stage, and yet it remained frustratingly elusive. When, exactly, did death occur? And what was the definition of life? Did movement, consciousness or sensation alone constitute life? The great decapitation machine brought these questions sharply into focus, but the debates about decapitation and death continue today in the field of medical ethics, and they prove that death is just as mysterious as ever.

  An experiment by researchers at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the 1990s proved that a headless animal can successfully give birth to offspring, when a pregnant sheep was decapitated while she was connected to a life-support machine. The lamb was born 30 minutes after its mother’s head had been cut off. Was the lamb’s mother ‘alive’ during the birth? It depends how you define life, and, not surprisingly, the experts still disagree. The sheep’s heart was beating, her blood was circulating, she was breathing through a respirator, and she was maintaining a constant internal environment. She was functioning, even if she was not exactly whole. The experiment was designed as a contribution to the ongoing debates about brain death, with the pregnant headless sheep substituting for a pregnant brain-dead woman. Some have argued that a woman who has been declared brain-dead is not dead because she can successfully gestate and give birth to a healthy baby.

  By decapitating a sheep, the researchers thought they had proved that a dead sheep can give birth, since who could argue that decapitation is not the very definition of death? Decapitation is final. No one without their head can be said still to be alive. But, rather like the earlier experiments on human heads, the results of the sheep experiment have still left opinions divided. Some say that it proves that a dead sheep can give birth to live young; others say that it merely proves that the ‘dead’ sheep was actually kept alive for a while despite being decapitated. Maybe the experiment simply proved that losing your head does not bring an end to your body after all. At least, not for about 30 minutes with the help of extensive medical technology and the efforts of a number of highly trained scientists.

  The notion of brain death, which has come to dominate clinical definitions of death, is a deeply contentious issue. Not only, as the sheep and countless hospital patients have shown, can a whole range of bodily functions be successfully maintained after brain death, leading some to believe that brain-dead patients should not be considered dead at all, but it is still not clear how long it takes the brain to die in the first place. It used to be thought that the brain could survive for about four minutes without oxygen, but experiments on pigs have shown that they can recover, without any apparent brain damage, after fifteen minutes of cardiac arrest. Dr Soemmerring would no doubt have welcomed these results as support for his theory that heads could live without their bodies for a quarter of an hour. The moment of death remains a physiological, and philosophical, problem that simply refuses to come into focus. The harder you look, the more it recedes from view.

  Of course, human heads are no longer used in this kind of research, but for more than a century, European savants prodded and poked at severed heads to satisfy their curiosity. The dark irony of all these experiments was that in trying to prove that decapitation was painful, scientists were inflicting tests on their subjects that were potentially agonizing. For if consciousness could persist in a severed head, then these doctors were intent on prolonging it, often by the most excruciating means, for as long as possib
le, without any real hope of proving their hypotheses.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, around the time of Lignières’ experiments with dog’s blood and human heads, there was growing indignation about this kind of work. One opponent remarked:

  The cruelest of executioners who burns, torments with pincers, and turns on the wheel is a dove in comparison with the scientist who plays with these bloody heads. The law says: no torture may be used on the condemned. No doubt the legislator could not have foreseen that the ingenuity of a physiologist would go as far as torturing a dead person. This decapitated human being has paid his debt. No one has the right to make him pay a second time.

  Research on human heads was considered by growing numbers of people to be both demeaning and unethical. Perhaps the mysterious moment of death should be left well alone.

  Studies like these became increasingly rare in the twentieth century, but they did not cease completely. As late as 1957, doctors in France concluded: ‘Every vital element survives decapitation … [giving] the impression of a horrible experience, of a murderous vivisection, followed by a premature burial.’ For as long as the guillotine was the chosen means of execution in France there was an urge to answer unanswerable questions about how decapitation felt.