9. JUST A HEAD
Decapitation, Reanimation, and the Human Head Transplant
If you really wanted to know for sure that the human soul resides in the brain, you could cut off a man’s head and ask it. You would have to ask quickly, for the human brain cut off from its blood supply will slide into unconsciousness after ten or twelve seconds. You would, further, have to instruct the man to answer with blinks, for, having been divorced from his lungs, he can pull no air through his larynx and thus can no longer speak. But it could be done. And if the man seemed more or less the same individual he was before you cut off his head, perhaps a little less calm, then you would know that indeed the self is there in the brain.
In Paris, in 1795, an experiment very much like this was nearly undertaken. Four years before, the guillotine had replaced the noose as the executioner’s official tool. The device was named after Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin, though he did not invent it. He merely lobbied for its use, on the grounds that the decapitating machine, as he preferred to call it, was an instantaneous, and thus more humane, way to kill.
And then he read this:
Do you know that it is not at all certain when a head is severed from the body by the guillotine that the feelings, personality and ego are instantaneously abolished…? Don’t you know that the seat of the feelings and appreciation is in the brain, that this seat of consciousness can continue to operate even when the circulation of the blood is cut off from the brain…? Thus, for as long as the brain retains its vital force the victim is aware of his existence. Remember that Haller insists that a head, having been removed from the shoulders of a man, grimaced horribly when a surgeon who was present stuck a finger into the rachidian canal…. Furthermore, credible witnesses have assured me that they have seen the teeth grind after the head has been separated from the trunk. And I am convinced that if the air could still circulate through the organs of the voice… these heads would speak….
…The guillotine is a terrible torture! We must return to hanging.
It was a letter, published in the November 9, 1795, Paris Moniteur (and reprinted in André Soubiran’s biography of Guillotin), written by the well-respected German anatomist S. T. Sömmering. Guillotin was horrified, the Paris medical community atwitter. Jean-Joseph Sue, the librarian at the Paris School of Medicine, came out in agreement with Sömmering, declaring his belief that the heads could see hear, smell, see, and think. He tried to convince his colleagues to undertake an experiment whereby “before the butchery of the victim,” a few of the unfortunate’s friends would arrange a code of eyelid or jaw movements which the head could use after the execution to indicate whether it was “fully conscious of [its] agony.” Sue’s colleagues in the medical community dismissed his idea as ghastly and absurd, and the experiment was not carried out. Nonetheless, the notion of the living head had made its way into the public consciousness and even popular literature. Below is a conversation between a pair of fictional executioners, in Alexandre Dumas’s Mille et Un Phantomes:
“Do you believe they’re dead because they’ve been guillotined?”
“Undoubtedly!”
“Well, one can see that you don’t look in the basket when they are all there together. You’ve never seen them twist their eyes and grind their teeth for a good five minutes after the execution. We are forced to change the basket every three months because they cause such damage to the bottom.”
Shortly after Sömmering’s and Sue’s pronouncements, Georges Martin, an assistant to the official Paris executioner and witness to some 120 beheadings, was interviewed on the subject of the heads and their post-execution activities. Soubiran writes that he cast his lot (not surprisingly) on the side of instantaneous death. He claimed to have viewed all 120 heads within two seconds and always “the eyes were fixed…. The immobility of the lids was total. The lips were already white….” Medical science was, for the moment, reassured, and the furor dissipated.
But French science was not through with heads. A physiologist named Legallois surmised in an 1812 paper that if the personality did indeed reside in the brain, it should be possible to revive une tête séparée du tronc by giving it an injection of oxygenated blood through its severed cerebral arteries. “If a physiologist attempted this experiment on the head of a guillotined man a few instants after death,” wrote Legallois’s colleague Professor Vulpian, “he would perhaps bear witness to a terrible sight.”
Theoretically, for as long as the blood supply lasted, the head would be able to think, hear, see, smell (grind its teeth, twist its eyes, chew up the lab table), for all the nerves above the neck would still be intact and attached to the organs and muscles of the head. The head wouldn’t be able to speak, owing to the aforementioned disabling of the larynx, but this was probably, from the perspective of the experimenter, just as well.
Legallois lacked either the resources or the intestinal fortitude to follow through with the actual experiment, but other researchers did not.
In 1857, the French physician Brown-Séquard cut the head off a dog (“Je décapitai un chien…”) to see if he could put it back in action with arterial injections of oxygenated blood. Eight minutes after the head parted company with the neck, the injections began. Two or three minutes later, Brown-Séquard noted movements of the eyes and facial muscles that appeared to him to be voluntarily directed. Clearly something was going on in the animal’s brain.
With the steady supply of guillotined heads in Paris, it was only a matter of time before someone tried this out on a human. There could be only one man for the job, a man who would more than once make a name for himself (lots of names, probably) by doing peculiar things to bodies with the aim of resuscitating them. The man for the job was Jean Baptiste Vincent Laborde, the very same Jean Baptiste Vincent Laborde who appeared earlier in these pages advocating prolonged tongue-pulling as a means of reviving the comatose, mistaken-for-dead patient. In 1884, the French authorities began supplying Laborde with the heads of guillotined prisoners so that he could examine the state of their brain and nervous system. (Reports of these experiments appeared in various French medical journals, Revue Scientifique being the main one.) It was hoped that Laborde would get to the bottom of what he called la terrible legende—that it was possible for guillotined heads to be aware, if only for a moment, of their situation (in a basket, without a body). Upon a head’s arrival in his lab, he would quickly bore holes in the skull and insert needles into the brain in an attempt to trigger nervous system responses.
Following Brown-Séquard’s lead, he also tried resuscitating the heads with a supply of blood.
Laborde’s first subject was a murderer named Campi. From Laborde’s description, he was not a typical thug. He had delicate ankles and white, well-manicured hands. His skin was unblemished save for an abrasion on the left cheek, which Laborde surmised was the result of the head’s drop into the guillotine basket. Laborde didn’t typically spend so much time personalizing his subjects, preferring to call them simply restes frais. The term means, literally, “fresh remains,” though in French it has a pleasant culinary lilt, like something you might order off the specials board at the neighborhood bistro.
Campi arrived in two pieces, and he arrived late. Under ideal circumstances, the distance from the scaffold to Laborde’s lab on Rue Vauquelin could be covered in about seven minutes. Campi’s commute took an hour and twenty minutes, owing to what Laborde called “that stupid law” forbidding scientists to take possession of the remains of executed criminals until the bodies had crossed the threshold of the city cemetery. This meant Laborde’s driver had to follow the heads as they “made the sentimental journey to the turnip field” (if my French serves) and then pack them up and bring them all the way back across town to the lab. Needless to say, Campi’s brain had long since ceased to function in anything close to a normal state.