Is it painful to die by the guillotine?
Actually, death by guillotine is arguably the worst pain any animal can feel. It all has to do with nerve disruption. We lose nerve pathways all the time. Fibers die and the signal is either transferred to another path (gray fibers) or a new path is grown (white fibers). We feel this loss as a twinge or a pinpoint itch that has no apparent reason. Since it is only a fiber or two, we tend not to pay much attention. Now consider the sensation of a limb that has “fallen asleep” and the massive, often painful, tingling you feel when it “wakes up”. This is the sensation a person feels when the blade slices through the spinal cord and interrupts every nerve bundle, including the cranial nerves. Every nerve in your body seems to fire at the same time. The pain is horrifyingly intense. Check the artwork from the guillotine era. Victims’ faces are grotesquely malformed, the mouth is drawn open and the eyes are rolled back. What they don’t show is that sometimes the contortions can be so severe
