On July 17, 1793, a French female Assassin, Charlotte Cordey, was sent to the guillotine for failed murder. When the executioner took her head and slapped her at the end of the execution, her face turned red with anger.
That same year, the French anatomist Dr. Séguille became obsessed with the "beheaded" experiment. He once lifted a freshly cut head against the sun, and found that the skull's eyes immediately closed automatically, and his whole face revealed the pain of looking directly into the sun.
This makes people wonder, is there still consciousness after being decapitated? So can a person feel pain at the moment of being beheaded?
Beheaded, lost consciousness at 8/1000 seconds:
As for whether people are conscious after being beheaded, the French scientist Lavoisier has the most say in this matter, after all, he used himself to do the last scientific experiment in his life, that is, to go to the guillotine...
Born into a French aristocratic family in 1743, Antoine Lavoisier was a veritable rich second generation. For life and career planning, Lavoisier's father has always wanted his son to inherit his father's career and become a lawyer. But he himself was obviously more interested in the natural sciences, so he made up his own mind in college and went to study chemistry education.
In the field of scientific research, Lavoisier was the first to discover the list of chemical elements, so it was later revered as the "father of chemistry". At the same time that he became an honorary member of the French Academy of Sciences, he also became a tax collector, contracted the right to collect salt and tobacco in France, and officially advanced to the capitalist.
At that time, the French Revolution, which overthrew the dynastic rule, was in full swing, and Lavoisier was undoubtedly regarded as a typical punishment, so he was sent to the guillotine by the indignant masses of the people. After learning that his life was shortly over, Lavoisier did not panic a little, but instead remembered a question that had plagued him for many years: That is, after people were beheaded, were they still conscious?
So the warrior, who had devoted his life to science, made his last experiment, and before the executioner's execution, Lavoisier consulted with him: "When my head falls to the ground, I will blink at you if I am conscious, and if I do not blink at you, it proves that people will die immediately after being beheaded." ”
The executioner felt inexplicable, but he agreed to his request, and immediately after cutting off Lavoisier's head, he raised his head to count, and after counting, the executioner found that Lavoisier blinked eleven times.
Although this number is suspected of exaggeration, it can indeed prove that people are still conscious after being beheaded. And the Germans, who have always been known for their rigor, have done such medical research: it has been found that there is oxygen in the head after being decapitated, and the brain cells will not die immediately, so there will be consciousness for a while. However, after 8/1000 seconds, the beheaded person will lose all consciousness.
So the question is, since a person is still conscious after being beheaded, will he feel pain?
Whether there is pain after being beheaded:
Not really.
Some scientists have done such a visit experiment, according to the recollection of accidental amputees, in the moment when their hands or thighs were accidentally cut off, there was no pain in the first few seconds, and then they would feel that the original position of the hands and feet was cold, and finally accompanied by severe pain. And many people who are unfortunate enough to have their limbs removed also have the illusion that they are still healthy on all fours, which is the famous phantom limb effect.
But the decapitation is slightly different, first of all, there are common arteries and vertebral arteries on both sides of the neck, which add up to a total of 4 rushing large blood vessels. So once beheaded, blood will immediately gush out due to circulatory pressure. At this time, the brain will also be extremely traumatized by the body and adrenaline rush, and finally fall into death.
Combined with this whole process, we can infer how a person will feel after being beheaded:
First of all, you will feel a chill in your neck, and then your head will also have the illusion that the whole person is spinning in the sky due to the phantom limb effect, which is somewhat similar to the feeling of a diver falling into the water while spinning, followed by adrenaline to smooth out all the pain, and finally before there is time for pain, the whole person gradually falls into a coma until complete death.
In contrast, animals can survive for a long time after the severed head because of the relatively simple neurons in the body, such as cobras can spray venom a few hours after the severed head, but this does not require brain command, it is purely instinctive.
Of course, although in theory, beheading is not painful, but how much beheading feels is also related to the executioner's technique.
Pain is also related to the executioner:
Although capital punishment for beheading has now been abolished, for thousands of years, beheading, whether in the East or the West, has been quite ornamental as the ultimate criminal law of mankind.
In London, England in the early 19th century, there were probably 5,000 people watching a standard beheading, or as many as 40,000 if a famous felon had been killed. For example, in 1936, when the United States last publicly executed the beheading, it attracted more than 20,000 people to watch.
So beheading became the executioner's masterpiece. How the executioner's knife technique will make the beheaded person painful will become the audience's judgment joke after tea.
For a competent executioner, the beheaded man must be in a different place after the knife is raised. There are also many executioners who are influenced by the audience, or the knife technique is very stupid, which makes the criminal suffer a lot of unnecessary torture.
For example, when Queen Mary Of Sugarland was executed, it was estimated that Queen Mary was too beautiful, resulting in the clumsy executioner cutting her head three times without cutting off her head. When Mary suffered the first axe, she made a low and tragic sound. In the end, the executioner had to cut off her skin and cartilage with a knife, a beheading technique that made her tingle just by listening to it.
Later, due to too many professional mistakes of executioners, many passionate people felt that they were not addicted after seeing the executioners' improper knife techniques, so they threw stones at them and threw fire cans. So in order to prevent this phenomenon from happening, in April 1792, France took the lead in inventing a new type of decapitation machine - the guillotine.
All the guillotine needs is a pulley and a giant axe to make the decapitated person's head in a different place and die painlessly. However, at that time, many people still felt that the guillotine machine was too fast, too sloppy and sloppy, and there was nothing to see, but they missed the original executioner who made the criminal miserable.
Write at the end:
Although after scientific research, people found that the moment of decapitation did not feel pain. However, because beheading is too shocking, the human world has reached a consensus to abolish the inhumane death penalty of beheading. And people die like lights out, whether the beheading pain or not, the next person to be beheaded will be greeted by boundless darkness.
bibliography:
[1] Francis. A short history of human beheading[M].Hainan Publishing House.2012.
Author: Xiao Yang Proofreader: Plum