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September 1, 2006

Strange But True!

Q. The grisly-looking guillotine doesn't seem like a humane mode of execution. You might be surprised at who thought it was.

A. Not Nobel Prize-winning author Albert Camus, whose 1959 “Reflections on the Guillotine” publicized medical studies showing that signs of life continued in the head and body for “minutes, even hours.” But French Revolutionary physician-lawmaker Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738-1814) had himself helped win approval to replace the noose and the broadax with an efficient decapitation machine that seemed to reduce cruelty in capital punishment, says Mark Davidson in “Right, Wrong, and Risky: A Dictionary of Today's American English Usage.”


 
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