In 1880, physician Dassy de Lignieres declared his belief that severed heads hear the voices of the crowd and see the guillotine while dying, contradicting the British Medical Journal who had declared in 1879 that there was no evidence of sight or feeling in the head of a decapitated murderer. He based his belief on an experiment he performed with the severed head of a murderer that he was given three hours after decapitation. He pumped blood from a living dog into the head and for two seconds the lips and eyelids fluttered. He concluded: “I affirm that during the two seconds the brain thought.”
Posted on: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 18:00:00 +0000