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Some stories in history have a long life, although they are not true. An example of this is the guillotine invented by a doctor named Guillotine, who later lost his life in one.
It all started in 1789 in revolutionary France, says author Eddie Persson in the new book “Doctor Guillotine. A story without a head ”(Editorial Santérus). In front of the newly established National Assembly, which had taken power from King Louis XVI, a respected physician named Joseph-Ignace Guillotin appeared. He had a radical proposal: he wanted the death penalty to be abolished. According to Dr. Guillotin, it was contrary to all reasonable humanitarian principles to execute criminals, regardless of the seriousness of their crimes.
However, the proposal was immediately rejected. Soon after, therefore, Guillotin returned with another proposal. If it is now absolutely necessary to continue executing people, you should not do it as cruelly as before, nor should you make a difference between people and people. Because that has traditionally been the case. Nobles were beheaded with swords, while ordinary people were generally hanged. The latter could take a long time and was therefore often very painful. The punishment also included in many cases brutal torture before death.
These methods should be replaced with a quick and painless solution, said Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. Specifically, the defendant must be beheaded, “through a simple mechanism”, as it is called in his proposal. The doctor did not specify more details than that.
The guillotine proposal was formally adopted by the National Assembly in January 1790. It then took some time before the project was implemented. At the end of 1791, the revolution entered a new phase, when thousands of suspected opponents of the new order were imprisoned and sentenced to death. The Paris executioner warned that it would be expensive and difficult to execute so many. For this reason, the National Assembly commissioned another doctor, Antoine Louis, to make Guillotin’s general proposal a reality.
In Scotland, for example, an autumnal automobile called “The Maiden” was in use since the mid-16th century and for almost two hundred years.
Together with a craftsman named Tobias Schmidt, Louis designed the so-called fall car, a machine in which a heavy, sharp blade is released from a great height and cuts off the convict’s head with a single cut. Similar machines had been developed at various times throughout history, so there were many role models to use. In Scotland, for example, an autumnal automobile called “The Maiden” was in use since the middle of the 16th century and for almost two hundred years.
Antoine Louis and Tobias Schmidt worked hard. During development work, they realized, among other things, that a partially skewed sheet would give the best results. On April 25, 1792, the new machine was used for the first time in Paris, on an assassin named Nicolas-Jaques Pelletier, with excellent results. Pelletier died very quickly and the machine also proved to be easy to operate. In the years that followed, it was used to kill thousands of people, including both the French King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette.
However, Dr. Guillotin did not die this way., which states a tenacious tale. It is true that the doctor, like so many others, fell out of favor with the most radical revolutionaries. But he managed to get out of Paris and stay away until the so-called reign of terror fell. Then Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was able to return to the capital, to resume his work.
However, over time something happened that depressed him. The machine used to execute so many people was originally called “louisette” in the vernacular, after the doctor who designed it. But soon it began to be called “guillotine”, referring to him. Dr. Guillotin felt unfairly appointed: he was a staunch opponent of the death penalty as such, yet he came to be associated with an execution machine of a type that has been around for hundreds of years.
Until his death in 1814, at the age of 76, the intensive care physician continued to complain about how disgraced his name had been.
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