by Mary Roach
“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.
Infuriated by the waste of eighty critical postmortem minutes, Laborde decided to meet his next head at the cemetery gates and set directly to work on it. He and his assistants rigged a makeshift traveling laboratory in the back of a horse-drawn van, complete with lab table, five stools, candles, and the necessary equipment. The second subject was named Gamahut, a fact unlikely to be forgotten, owing to the man’s having had his name tattooed on his torso. Eerily, as though presaging his gory fate, he had also been tattooed with a portrait of himself from the neck up, which, without the lines of a frame to suggest an unseen body, gave him the appearance of a floating head.
Within minutes of its arrival in the van, Gamahut’s head was installed in a styptic-lined container and the men set to work, drilling holes in the skull and inserting needles into various regions of the brain to see if they could coax any activity out of the criminal’s moribund nervous system. The ability to perform brain surgery while traveling full tilt on a cobblestone street is a testament to the steadiness of Laborde’s hand and/or the craftsmanship of nineteenth-century broughams. Had the vehicle’s manufacturers known, they might have crafted a persuasive ad campaign, à la the diamond cutter in the backseat of the smooth-riding Oldsmobile.
Laborde’s team ran current through the needles, and the Gamahut head could be seen to make the predictable twitches of lip and jaw. At one point—to the astonished shouts of all present—the prisoner slowly opened one eye, as if, with great and understandable trepidation, he sought to figure out where he was and what sort of strange locality hell had turned out to be. But, of course, given the amount of time that had elapsed, the movement could have been nothing beyond a primitive reflex.
The third time around, Laborde resorted to basic bribery to expedite his head deliveries. With the help of the local municipality chief, the third head, that of a man named Gagny, was delivered to his lab just shy of seven minutes after the chop. The arteries on the right side of the neck were injected with oxygenated cow’s blood, and, in a break from Brown-Séquard’s protocol, the arteries on the other side were connected to those of a living animal: un chien vigoureux. Laborde had an arresting flair for details, which the medical journals of his day seemed pleased to accommodate. He devoted a full paragraph to an artful description of a severed head resting upright on the lab table, rocking ever so slightly left and right from the pulsing pressure of the dog’s blood as it pumped into the head. In another paper, he took pains to detail the postmortem contents of Gamahut’s excretory organs, though the information bore no relation to the experiment at hand, noting with seeming fascination that the stomach and intestines were completely empty save for un petit bouchon fécal at the far end.
With the Gagny head, Laborde came closest to restoring normal brain function. Muscles on the eyelids, forehead, and jaw could be made to contract. At one point Gagny’s jaw snapped shut so forcefully that a loud claquement dentaire was heard. However, given that twenty minutes had passed from the drop of the blade to the infusion of blood—and irreversible brain death sets in after six to ten minutes—it is certain that Gagny’s brain was too far gone to be brought around to anything resembling consciousness and he remained blessedly ignorant of h
is dismaying state of affairs. The chien, on the other hand, spent its final, decidedly less vigoureux minutes watching its blood pump into someone else’s head and no doubt produced some claquements dentaires of its own.
Laborde soon lost interest in heads, but a team of French experimenters named Hayem and Barrier took up where he left off. The two became something of a cottage industry, transfusing a total of twenty-two dog heads, using blood from live horses and dogs. They built a tabletop guillotine specially fitted to the canine neck and published papers on the three phases of neurological activity following decapitation. Monsieur Guillotin would have been deeply chagrined to read the concluding statements in Hayem and Barrier’s description of the initial, or “convulsive,” postdecapitation phase. The physiognomy of the head, they wrote, expresses surprise or “une grande anxiété,” and appears to be conscious of the exterior world for three or four seconds.
Eighteen years later, a French physician by the name of Beaurieux confirmed Hayem and Barrier’s observations—and Sömmering’s suspicions. Using Paris’s public scaffold as his lab, he carried out a series of simple observations and experiments on the head of a prisoner named Languille, the instant after the guillotine blade dropped.
Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds…[and] ceased. The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs,…exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to see every day in the exercise of our profession…. It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice, “Languille!” I then saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contraction…such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts. Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks. I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me.
After several seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the head took on the same appearance as it had had before I called out. It was at that point that I called out again, and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time…. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement—and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead….
You know, of course, where this is leading. It is leading toward human head transplants. If a brain—a personality—and its surrounding head can be kept functional with an outside blood supply for as long as that supply lasts, then why not go the whole hog and actually transplant it onto a living, breathing body, so that it has an ongoing blood supply? Here the pages fly from the calendar and the globe spins on its stand, and we find ourselves in St. Louis, Missouri, May 1908.
Charles Guthrie was a pioneer in the field of organ transplantation. He and a colleague, Alexis Carrel, were the first to master the art of anastomosis: the stitching of one vessel to another without leaks. In those days, the task required great patience and dexterity, and very thin thread (at one point, Guthrie tried sewing with human hair). Having mastered the skill, Guthrie and Carrel went anastomosis-happy, transplanting pieces of dog thighs and entire forelimbs, keeping extra kidneys alive outside of bodies and stitching them into groins. Carrel went on to win the Nobel Prize for his contributions to medicine; Guthrie, the meeker and humbler of the two, was rudely overlooked.
On May 21, Guthrie succeeded in grafting one dog’s head onto the side of another’s neck, creating the world’s first manmade two-headed dog. The arteries were grafted together such that the blood of the intact dog flowed through the head of the decapitated dog and then back into the intact dog’s neck, where it proceeded to the brain and back into circulation. Guthrie’s book Blood Vessel Surgery and Its Applications includes a photograph of the historic creature. Were it not for the caption, the photo would seem to be of some rare form of marsupial dog, with a large baby’s head protruding from a pouch in its mother’s fur. The transplanted head was sewn on at the base of the neck, upside down, so that the two dogs are chin to chin, giving an impression of intimacy, despite what must have been at the very least a strained coexistence. I imagine photographs of Guthrie and Carrel around that time having much the same quality.
As with Monsieur Gagny’s head, too much time (twenty minutes) had elapsed between the beheading and the moment circulation was restored for the dog head and brain to regain much function. Guthrie recorded a series of primitive movements and basic reflexes, similar to what Laborde and Hayem had observed: pupil contractions, nostril twitchings, “boiling movements” of the tongue. Only one notation in Guthrie’s lab notes gives the impression that the upside-down dog head might have had an awareness of what had taken place: “5:31: Secretion of tears….” Both dogs were euthanized when complications set in, about seven hours after the operation.
The first dog heads to enjoy, if that word can be used, full cerebral function were those of transplantation whiz Vladimir Demikhov, in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Demikhov minimized the time that the severed donor head was without oxygen by using “blood-vessel sewing machines.” He transplanted twenty puppy heads—actually, head-shoulders-lungs-and-forelimbs units with an esophagus that emptied, untidily, onto the outside of the dog—onto fully grown dogs, to see what they’d do and how long they’d last (usually from two to six days, but in one case as long as twenty-nine days).
In his book Experimental Transplantation of Vital Organs, Demikhov includes photographs of, and lab notes from, Experiment No. 2, on February 24, 1954: the transplantation of a one-month-old puppy’s head and forelimbs to the neck of what appears to be a Siberian husky. The notes portray a lively, puppylike, if not altogether joyous existence on the part of the head:
09:00. The donor’s head eagerly drank water or milk, and tugged as if trying to separate itself from the recipient’s body.
22:30. When the recipient was put to bed, the transplanted head bit the finger of a member of the staff until it bled.
February 26, 18:00. The donor’s head bit the recipient behind the ear, so that the latter yelped and shook its head.
Demikhov’s transplant subjects were typically done in by immune reactions. Immunosuppressive drugs weren’t yet available, and the immune system of the intact dog would, understandably enough, treat the dog parts grafted to its neck as a hostile invader and proceed accordingly. And so Demikhov hit a wall. Having transplanted virtually every piece and combination of pieces of a dog into or onto another dog,* he closed up his lab and disappeared into obscurity.
If Demikhov had known more about immunology, his career might have gone quite differently. He might have realized that the brain enjoys what is known as “immunological privilege,” and can be kept alive on another body’s blood supply for weeks without rejection. Because it is protected by the blood brain barrier, it isn’t rejected the way other organs and tissues are. While the mucosal tissues of Guthrie’s and Demikhov’s transplanted dog heads began swelling and hemorrhaging within a day or two of the operation, the brains at autopsy appeared normal.
Here is where it begins to get strange.
In the mid-1960s, a neurosurgeon named Robert White began experimenting with “isolated brain preparations”: a living brain taken out of one animal, hooked up to another animal’s circulatory system, and kept alive. Unlike Demikhov’s and Guthrie’s whole head transplants, these brains, lacking faces and sensory organs, would live a life confined to memory and thought. Given that many of these dogs’ and monkeys’ brains were implanted inside the necks and abdomens of other animals, this could only have been a blessing. While the inside of someone else’s abdomen is of moderate interest in a sort of curiosity-seeking, Surgery Channel sort of way, it’s not the sort of place you want to settle down in to live out the remai
nder of your years.
White figured out that by cooling the brain during the procedure to slow the processes by which cellular damage occurs—a technique used today in organ recovery and transplant operations—it was possible to retain most of the organ’s normal functions. Which means that the personality—the psyche, the spirit, the soul—of those monkeys continued to exist, for days on end, without its body or any of its senses, inside another animal. What must that have been like? What could possibly be the purpose, the justification? Had White been thinking of one day isolating a human brain like this? What kind of person comes up with a plan like this and carries it out?
To find out, I decided to go visit White in Cleveland, where he is spending his retirement. We planned to meet at the Metro Health Care Center, downstairs from the lab where he carried out his historic operations, which has been preserved as a kind of shrine-cum-media-photo-op. I was an hour early, and spent the time driving up and down Metro Health Care Drive, looking for a place to sit and have some coffee and review White’s papers. There was nothing. I ended up back at the hospital, on a patch of grass outside the parking garage. I had heard Cleveland had undergone some sort of renaissance, but apparently it underwent it in some other part of town. Let’s just say it wasn’t the sort of place I’d want to live out the remainder of my years, though it beats a monkey abdomen, and you can’t say that about some neighborhoods.
