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E RHS 612 0333
E RHS 612 0333
ISSN 0151-4105
ISBN 9782200924904
DOI 10.3917/rhs.612.0333
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The Debate over Severed Heads
In 1752, Antoine Louis had taken part in the public debate over the
signs of death. Contrary to Jacques-Jean Bruhier, he had reasserted
there was medical certainty on the subject.9 Louis had also become
4 - Buchez and Roux, Histoire parlementaire 448.
5 - Buchez and Roux, Histoire parlementaire, 447.
6 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur (Paris: Henri Plon,1859), Vol. II, 410.
7 - Louis’s report is printed as an appendix to the draft bill of député Prosper-Hyacinthe
Carlier in Le Moniteur of March 22, 1792, cf. Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur,
Vol. XI (1862), 689.
8 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, Vol. XI, 689.
9 - Jacques Jean Bruhier, a doctor in Paris, published in 1742 a Dissertation sur l’incerti-
tude des signes de la mort (Dissertation on the Uncertainty of the Signs of death) by
Jacques-Bénigne Winslow, in which he drew up a list of apparently dead people who
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The Debate over Severed Heads
Sömmerring
In 1795, Le Moniteur published a letter by the famous German
anatomist Samuel Thomas Sömmerring (1755–1830)19 written to
15 - See the account—which is very novel like—by his descendant, Henri-Clément Sanson,
on the invention of the guillotine, Sept générations d’exécuteurs (Paris: Dupray de La
Mahérie, 1862), Vol. III, 389.
16 - The expression comes from the Goncourt brothers. Histoire de la société française pen-
dant la Révolution, de Goncourt, Edmond and Jean de Goncourt (Paris:Dentu, 1854),
468.
17 - Anonymous article, reproduced by Louis du Bois in Charlotte de Corday: Essai his-
torique, offrant enfin des détails authentiques sur la personne et l’attentat de cette
héroïne (Paris: Librairie Historique de la Révolution, 1838), 181.
18 - See the letter by Antoine Roussillon reprinted by Du Bois, Charlotte de Corday, 139.
19 - Also sometimes spelled Sömmering. Lettre de M. Soemmering à M. Oelsner sur le
supplice de la guillotine, Gazette nationale or Le Moniteur universel, 48 (18 Brumaire,
an IV) – Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, Vol. XI, 378–379; the text is also reprinted
with a presentation by Oelsner in Magasin encyclopédique ou Journal des sciences,
des lettres et des arts (Paris, 1795), Vol. 3, 463–477.
20 - See Oelsner’s presentation, which clarifies the circumstances of the publication, in
Magasin encyclopédique, Vol. 3, 463.
21 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, Vol. XI 378.
22 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, Vol. XI 378
23 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, Vol. XI 378
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The Debate over Severed Heads
But how long did this phenomenon last? According to the head’s
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24 - Melchior Adam Weikard (1742–1803). Sömmerring refers to his book, Der philoso-
phische Arzt (Frankfurt a. M.: Andreä, 1790), 221.
25 - Sömmerring cites Elementa physiologicae corporis humani (Lausanne, 1757–1778),
Vol. IV, 35.
26 - Heinrich Palmatius von Leveling (1742–1798).
27 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, Vol. XI 379.
Now let us suppose that the head of the person with gout be sep-
arated from his body: can one believe that in the very instant after
separation, his foot no longer suffers? No, because until life is
completely extinguished, there will be pain in the sick part of the
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because of the pain with which it affects members that are sepa-
rated from the body. Indeed, according to this distinction,
if, after its division, the body hurts locally, that is, . . .without any
correlation, it is equally true that the body suffers. So why would
one want to see the pains of the body as being nothing because it is
no longer attached to the head? It suffers as a body suffers, and the
head as a head. . .. So, there is a reason for asking, in my opinion,
whether, when a leg is cut off and the stump cauterized, there is
any pain; if any member is irritated, a frog’s leg for example, even
separated from the body, is there pain in that leg?31
As for the head, it suffers just as the foot does, except, it is true, that
this sensation is amplified incomparably by its spheroidal form,
and by the function of thinking, proper to the brain it protects.
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The Debate over Severed Heads
The first major argument against Sömmerring and Sue pointed out
their confusion of irritability and sensibility. Convulsions of the eyes
and face, contrary to what they claimed, do not show that sensibil-
ity survives after a head is cut off but only the automatic irritability
of the nerves, which, it is known, can continue in a member that
has been separated from the body.
Why, indeed, confuse moral sensibility and pain with the irrita-
bility of the nerves and purely mechanical sensibility? Why give
words a meaning contrary to usage? . . .If by pain, you understand
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42 - Reported in the entry on his life by Charles Brainne, Les Hommes illustres de l’Orléanais
(Orléans, 1852), 232.
43 - Jean-Baptiste Léveillé, “Is feeling entirely destroyed as soon as the head is suddenly sep-
arated from the rest of the body by some cutting instrument?”, Magasin encyclopédique
ou Journal des sciences, des lettres et des arts, 5 (1795), 453–462. The debate spread to
Germany with Professor of Medicine, Carl Friedrich Clossius (1768–1797) in Tübingen
and doctor and philosopher Carl Eschenmayer (1768–1852), a disciple of Schelling,
taking opposite sides.
44 - René-Georges Gastellier, Que penser enfin du supplice de la guillotine? Nouvel exam-
en de cette question (Paris, an IV/1796), 6–7.
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and thought are over: “The separation of the head from the body. . .
attacks the essence of life directly and immediately, and conse-
quently the essence of feeling and thought: and that is how Messrs.
Sömmerring and Sue are refuted.”45 Furthermore, the pain caused
by the blade must be almost nil since is only lasts an instant—that
is, an indivisible point of time.
Though I agree with the opinion of Mr. Wedekind and Dr. Lepelletier
on the substance of the matter, I do not think, as they do, that exe-
cution by the guillotine is in some way humane. . ..Will the time
ever come when society no longer believes it has the right to take
from men a life that they receive only from nature?46
Cabanis
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This conclusion assumes, however, that one agrees to say that “the
soul exists and suffers only in the head”; the other option would be
to maintain that “sensation and pain must necessarily be found in
all the twitching parts of the cut-up body.”49 In choosing the latter,
Sue was being more coherent than Sömmerring: indeed, in this
case, to make muscle contraction the sign of sensibility, sensibility
has to be conceived of as distributed throughout the body, and not
as located in the brain. One would then say that “sensibility can
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The problem is not that this thesis is false but rather that it is not
relevant to the question posed. For, as Cabanis points out:
the question is not whether, when a leg is cut off and the stump
cauterized, there is pain in that leg, or when the severed leg of a
frog is irritated, there is pain in the frog’s leg. It is whether the man
to whom the leg belonged and the frog to which the leg belonged
have a feeling or awareness of pain. Now, it is certain they do not.51
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52 - Later, Marie-François-Xavier Bichat put forward the same arguments: “How little basis
there is for the opinion of those who believed that, with regard to those punished by
the guillotine, the brain could live on for a while, and even that sensations of pleasure
or pain could be relayed to it. The action of this organ is connected immediately to
its double excitation, first by movement and secondly by the nature of the blood it
receives. Now when excitation is suddenly nil, the interruption of all types of feelings
must be sudden” (Marie-François-Xavier Bichat, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie
et la mort (Paris, 1822), 383.
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The second problem concerns the nature of the soul as a life prin-
ciple. As in classical definitions, matter is a composite reality
whereas the soul, a psychic entity, is conceived of as a single thing.
So, to accept the scattered persistence of fragments of the soul in
pieces of the body is to contradict this fundamental principle. The
case of the dismembered insect has thus been a topos in debates
on the unity of the soul and the status—logical or real—of —the
distinction between its faculties since Antiquity.60 The case of “seg-
mented insects” poses a particular difficulty in that these detached
members retain for a time their ability to move, their sensation, etc.
Leibniz responded thus:
From this perspective, the classical solution for ensuring that the
continued movement of a member move after being separated from
the animal did not contradict the thesis of the unity of the soul was
to distinguish a number of life principles in the body—to diffract,
as it were, the concept of life in order to preserve the unity of soul
and thereby anticipate any materialist objection. It is for example
possible to maintain that the irritable life of the organs continues
even when they are no longer animated by any sensible soul.
It does not follow that, because the soul, or the sensible princi-
ple, continues to animate severed animal parts, it is really divisible
and separable into as many parts as the body. Mr. de Haller most
unjustly attributes this opinion to me.64
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function for him in the debate. We have seen that the principal
objection to Sue’s thesis was to say that movements of the face on
severed heads required the sufficient condition of simple irritability,
which by definition differs from sensibility.67 Unlike Sömmerring,
Sue perceived the solid basis for this objection, and attempted to
anticipate it by proceeding in two stages. First, he agreed with
his critics that the movements of the severed head come funda-
mentally from the same principles as those observed in separated
members. He then questioned whether irritability is in every case
a sufficient explanatory principle, and developed the idea of local
sensibility spread throughout the body.
67 - This argument is also put forward by Sébastien Mercier: “[. . .] this irritability or muscle
contraction in a body that is still warm, though deprived of life, cannot stimulate the
least sensibility, and should not be confused with it. No one has ever thought that when
a worm or eel is cut into several pieces, the animal’s sensibility can be stimulated by
irritating one of the separated pieces with the point of a pin.” (Sébastien Mercier, Le
Nouveau Paris, reprinted (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), 209.
68 - Canguilhem, La Formation du concept de réflexe, 98.
69 - “Irritability is the faculty of contraction that appears to be inherent to muscle fiber, and
which the muscle has even after death, or after it has been separated from the nerve
reaction centers. The fiber, stimulated by various stimuli, alternately contracts and ex-
pands and that is all. But, in coordinated movements of organs, there is more than
this, and everybody agrees with this. Now apart from these movements determined by
perceived impression, there are a number of movement that are determined by impres-
sions of which an individual is in no manner aware. . . and yet they cease when the
organ no longer communicates with the sensible centers, in a word, they cease with
sensibility. . .. So, as we are only calling sensation [by the name of] perceived impres-
sion, there is truly sensibility without sensation.” (Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du
moral de l’homme, in Œuvres (Paris, 1824), Vol. IV, 276–277.)
70 - Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme.
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Now in response to the question “Where does the self live in the
body?” Sömmerring provided an original answer, which largely
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The guillotine was not only “experimental” in the sense that the
apparatus required testing—which was carried out at the Bicêtre
Hospital—prior to being used but above all in the sense that this new
mechanism gave rise to new death-related phenomena linked to a
new method of producing cadavers that could be used immediately
in research in experimental medicine. Here the guillotine appears as
an instrument of phenomeno-technology in the Bachelardian sense
as a procedure producing phenomena that are the object of science.79
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A “Metaphysical Experiment”
Maupertuis could only imagine being able to dissect persons who
had been condemned to death and subject them to “metaphysical
experiments” that would settle once and for all the old debates
on the union of the soul and body.84 Ironically, the guillotine fur-
nished a real instrument for this macabre utopia of progress in the
sciences and the arts.
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A “Passive Experiment”
But here an objection may be made: to what extent can we talk
about experimentation here when the doctors were not strictly
speaking the instigators of the phenomenon they were analyzing?
87 - Cf. Michel Foucault, “La technologie politique des individus,” Dits et écrits (Paris:
Gallimard, 1999), Vol. IV, 826: “As the population is never anything other than what
the State watches over in its own interest, of course, the State may, as needed, massacre
it. Thanatopolitics is thus the reverse of biopolitics.”
88 - Louis Dubois, “Recherches sur les dernières années de Louis et de Vicq d’Azyr,”
Bulletin de l’Académie impériale de médecine, 32 (1866–1867), 39. Dubois adds: “In
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truth, a strange consultation! And which until then had never undoubtedly been asked
of a man exercising the healing art: it was always been decapitation that was wanted
but with three conditions: certainty, speed and uniformity, the surgeon’s tuto et cito.”
(Recherches, 29–30.)
89 - Dubois, Recherches, 40.
90 - Emmanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (New York: Abaris, 1979), 41–3.
The physician may thus state the truth but only in hypothetical
imperative mode: “If you want a painless death, then you must. . ..”
In this case, the physician must not pronounce on the ends that
govern his practice of medicine, and which are presupposed,
but only on what has to be done in relation to the objective pre-
sented to him. Technical subordination to written law and scien-
tific authority founded on the laws of nature are the two features
that define the paradoxical position of the doctor as expert and
technician. With the authority of its knowledge and the position of
expertise attributed to it by the political powers, medical science
can judge and if necessary criticize criminal policies on the basis
of experimental evaluation of their effects. Ultimately the question
is whether doctors agree to respond to the demands of political
power solely from the position of expert-experimenter they have
been given, and, thus, whether they limit their critique to simply
evaluating the effects of decapitation.
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