A little late for the start of August for work reasons, but here’s the first Eponymy in August for 2019.
Today’s Eponymy is the guillotine. The guillotine is a device for cleanly and reliably committing executions by beheading. A large, slightly angled blade on a frame of vertical rails is hoisted via a rope, the victim is placed in a headstock with their neck directly under the blade, and when the rope is released, the blade drops and slices through the victim’s neck using just its downward momentum.
The guillotine is strongly associated with the French Revolution, and with good reason. Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin proposed its use in France in 1789, but in keeping with Stigler’s Law, did not himself invent the structure. At the time, execution in France was done by beheading with a sword or axe for the nobility, hanging for the peasantry — swords and axes sometimes take more than one hit, and hanging requires precisely measuring the length of the drop to prevent slow asphyxiation or gruesome decaptiation. Dr. Guillotin was opposed to the death penalty in general, but argued first for a mechanical method that would be used for all classes and reduce the degree of spectacle that an execution usually attracted. Alas, history showed that execution had to get much more boring and other entertainment much more entertaining before that would become a reality.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin studied medicine at Reims in Paris after an early academic career in the arts and humanities. He was known to the royal court by the 1780s, and was part of a commission tasked to investigate the claims of Franz Mesmer (what we would now call hypnosis) in 1784. Just before the Revolution broke out in 1789, Guillotin became a deputy representing Paris in the Constituent Assembly. This gave him a platform to argue for humane treatment of convicts, and during debates for reforming the penal code in October 1789, Guillotin proposed using a mechanical device for beheadings (though without specifics). Later, with his advisory, the German inventor Tobias Schmidt and the king’s physician Antoine Louis developed a prototype for the beheading machine. It was legally made the only method of execution in France in 1791, and the first execution using it happened the next year.
In his later years Dr. Guillotin continued working toward improvements in both the general health of humanity and the status of doctors. He served as the President of the Central Committee on Vaccinations in Paris after the discovery of the smallpox vaccine, and also helped found the Academy of Medicine of Paris, a spiritual ancestor of the modern National Academy of Medicine. Guillotin died of natural causes in 1814. It’s reported that he was ashamed of being associated with the invention, and after his death, his family changed their name after a failed petition to the government to change the name of the machine.