5. Keeping a Dog’s Head Alive
You probably know all about the popular use of the guillotine during the French Revolution, which severed many heads. You may have even heard the numerous accounts of people seeing heads’ eyes blink after being severed. With these observations, many started to wonder if it was possible to keep a severed head alive. Soon enough, Sergey Brukhonenko, a Soviet physician in the 1920s decided to test this theory. Since using a human head would seem a little crazy, Brukhonenko decided to use a dog’s head, which he was able to successfully keep alive with the use of a machine he made known as an “autojector.” The machine acted like the dog’s heart and lungs, and to prove that the dog was still alive, Brukhonenko would shine a light in its eyes and it would blink. He’d also slam a heavy object on the table and the dog would flinch, and he even went as far to feed the dog food, which just fell out of its throat. By responding to stimuli, it was obvious that the dog’s head was in fact alive.
What’d We Learn
From these experiments, the first successful heart-lung machines were later created. We’ve also learned that if you do some whacky experiments, you become the talk of the town, or in Brukhonenko’s case, the talk of all of Europe. George Bernard Shaw poked fun at the experiments, stating that he’d love to be Brukhonenko’s muse and live with his head cut off so that he could continue to write literature and plays.
4. Cerberus Minus 1
In the 1950’s, Vladimir Demikhov was determined to make some sort of new break when it came to organ transplants. To further his studies and knowledge about the subject, he decided to create a two-headed dog, which could only be done by attaching the front end of a puppy to the neck of an older German Shepherd
by grafting its shoulders and head. The puppy’s two front paws were often placed on each side of the other dog’s neck and was able to live, but not for long, often because the tissue was rejected. Demikhov not only made one two-headed dog, but 20 of them, most of which died within a few weeks, the longest living about a month.
What’d We Learn
It’s said that Demikhov’s experiment with making two-headed dogs lead to advances in heart and lung transplants in humans and also encouraged other doctors to perform similar experiments, such as Dr. Robert White’s two headed-monkey. While Demikhov’s aimed to become the first to do a successful organ transplant, Dr. Christian Barnard perfected the transplant before he died.
3. Setting a Homosexual Man Straight
After looking at research done by James Olds and Peter Milner regarding the septal regions of the brain, Robert Heath decided to take the information from the previous experiment and conduct his own by adding his own twist. Olds and Milner discovered that sensations of sexual arousal and pleasure are produced when the septal region of the brain is stimulated. During the 1950’s, Heath decided to try the experiment on men, instead of rats- but most importantly homosexual men. Heath aimed to test to see if he could stimulate these areas of the brain in order to turn a gay man straight. He placed electrodes into the septal region of the homosexual male’s brain and controlled the amount of applied stimulation. He then created a device that allowed the subject to “pleasure” himself, which was known as the “pleasure button.” In one session lasting three hours, the subject pressed the button 1500 times. With his libido skyrocketing, the subject was then introduced to a female prostitute. At first nothing happened, but when the prostitute offered to engage in sexual activity, the subject agreed. Not much is known of the subject after the experiments, except he became active in homosexual prostitution, but also possibly had an affair with a married woman.
What’d We Learn
A little pleasure goes a long way in this experiment. In the end, while the experiment may have been seen as a success, Heath wasn’t fully able to convert the homosexual subject into a heterosexual. I’m not sure the experiment provided a lot of new information to scientists.
2. What Face Would You Make While Decapitating a Rat?
We all know about facial expressions. A smile usually means one is happy, a frown indicates one is sad, and so on. However, in 1924, Carney Landis wanted to test the theory and find out if there is one special expression that is universal to everyone that is made when one experiences shock or disgust. Because he was fresh out of college with a psychology degree, Landis’ subjects for his experiment were fellow college students that he had known. In order to get accurate readings of the facial expressions, Landis used paint on his subject’s faces. The experiment started off normal; he’d have subjects smell ammonia, put their hand into a bucket of frogs with slime, or flash pornographic pictures at them. While this type of stimuli seems normal for an experiment about shock and disgust, this wasn’t the end of it. To conclude his experiment, Landis would hand his subject a knife and a live rat, and tell them to decapitate it. If the subject refused, Landis would decapitate the rat himself.
What’d We Learn
From his studies, Landis noted that his subjects, when in a hurry or feeling some sort of distress, did a “clumsy” job at decapitating the rat. However, Landis was never able to successfully match a facial expression to an emotion, therefore making his experiment not so successful. However, many look at his experiment and think of Stanley Milgram, as it is very shocking to see how his subjects, at least some of them, were willing to follow out such an absurd act, showing some sort of obedience.
1. Electrifying a Human Corpse
As if keeping a head alive wasn’t enough, Aldini Galvini decided to attempt to shock life into a human corpse after he realized that electricity, in high enough volts, was able to cause a dead corpse’s limbs to twitch (thanks to his uncle Luigi Galvini’s studies). Animals weren’t good enough for this experiment, so on January 17, 1803 George Forster was the victim, a recently executed murderer. To begin, the body was laid out and wires were placed on various places of the body, all which transmitted 120-volts of electricity. By placing the wires on the mouth and ears, Galvini noted that the jaw muscles moved and his entire face seemed to be in pain. His left eye is also said to have opened. As if the experiment couldn’t get any worse, Galvini decided to wrap it up by putting a wire on the ear and sticking the other in Forster’s rectum. According to those watching, his body “was on the eve of being restored to life.”
What’d We Learn
While we don’t exactly know how to bring a dead corpse back to live, we did learn that a high amount of voltage introduced to the body will make it move, more so jerk. While the experiment wasn’t the most enlightening, both Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe used the experiment ideas as inspiration for writing.
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