After someone made his appointment with the National Razor (guillotine), he was whisked away from the scene and taken to a burial ground where family could claim the body. If, however, no one was there to claim the body, physicians and surgeons might take the remains for experimentation.
In 1884, the human head to living dog was being reported in newspapers across the world. A physician took the head of an executed criminal and attached the main artery to the artery of a living dog. As fresh blood moved into the head, the head seemed to come alive.
“Placing the head on his experimental table in an upright position, the learned professor of physics connected its cold, lifeless carotid artery by means of a tube with the warm and throbbing corresponding artery in the neck of a living dog, and then removed the stop placed on the neck of the latter.”
Now that the head had a fresh supply of oxygen from the dog’s blood, the head lost its deathly pallor.
“As the warm blood from the dog reached and penetrated the arteries of the decapitated Campi, the face of the latter lost its livid hue, and color returned very markedly in the cheeks, which became suffused. The eyelids, long rigid in death, slowly moved, opened and disclosed the glassy eyes of the criminal whose soul was in another world.”
At that time, the good doctor said his only wish was that he could have gotten hold of the head a little sooner.
Later experimentations involved not only a fresh source of blood, but electrical currents which really seemed to make both the head and the decapitated body come alive.
Source: The Southern herald. (Liberty, Miss.), 29 Nov. 1884.
