Paul Loye (1861–1890) was a French

physician A physician (American English), medical practitioner (Commonwealth English), medical doctor, or simply doctor, is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through th ...

and "préparateur" for various physiological courses at the

Sorbonne Sorbonne may refer to: * Sorbonne (building), historic building in Paris, which housed the University of Paris and is now shared among multiple universities. *the University of Paris (c. 1150 – 1970) *one of its components or linked institution, ...

in the 1880s. His greatest contribution lay in his observations on the functions and organization of the

brain A brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as vision. It is the most complex organ in a ve ...

and

nervous system In biology, the nervous system is the highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting signals to and from different parts of its body. The nervous system detects environmental changes ...

.Autour d'un conte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam:" Le Secret de l'Échafaud" P Reboul - Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, 1949 - JSTOR "... Si enfin la librairie Flammarion pu- blie, en 1888, une édition du Secret (pour 60 centimes), c'est que s'étaient multipliées les expériences faites par des savants ou des médecins sur des cadavres de décapités, expériences qui permettaient à Paul Loye la publication de son ... " As a medical graduate student in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...

, Loye attempted to confirm the observations of

Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard FRS (8 April 1817 – 2 April 1894) was a Mauritian physiologist and neurologist who, in 1850, became the first to describe what is now called Brown-Séquard syndrome. Early life Brown-Séquard was born at Port ...

on the nervous system. Brown-Séquard had argued that all motor activity rested in the brain and operated through the nervous system alone. To observe the importance of the brain in the activity of the body, Loye constructed a

guillotine A guillotine is an apparatus designed for efficiently carrying out executions by beheading. The device consists of a tall, upright frame with a weighted and angled blade suspended at the top. The condemned person is secured with stocks at t ...

in the laboratory of the Sorbonne and decapitated several hundred

dog The dog (''Canis familiaris'' or ''Canis lupus familiaris'') is a domesticated descendant of the wolf. Also called the domestic dog, it is derived from the extinct Pleistocene wolf, and the modern wolf is the dog's nearest living relative. Do ...

s and other animals, recording the extent of each animal's movement after decapitation. Through these experiments, Loye concluded that the loss of complete

consciousness Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...

and brain

death Death is the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain an organism. For organisms with a brain, death can also be defined as the irreversible cessation of functioning of the whole brain, including brainstem, and brain ...

occurred immediately after decapitation, but various parts of the body, such as the

heart The heart is a muscular organ in most animals. This organ pumps blood through the blood vessels of the circulatory system. The pumped blood carries oxygen and nutrients to the body, while carrying metabolic waste such as carbon dioxide to t ...

, continued to work for several minutes as a

reflex action In biology, a reflex, or reflex action, is an involuntary, unplanned sequence or action and nearly instantaneous response to a stimulus. Reflexes are found with varying levels of complexity in organisms with a nervous system. A reflex occurs ...

. This confirmed the less-refined observations of Jean Baptiste Vincent Laborde who had experimented upon decapitated human heads in the early 1880s. Almost nothing is known of Loye's personal life. He once served as an assistant to the physiologist

Paul Bert Paul Bert (17 October 1833 – 11 November 1886) was a French zoologist, physiologist and politician. He is sometimes given the sobriquet "Father of Aviation Medicine". Life Bert was born at Auxerre (Yonne). He studied law, earning a doctorate ...

, whose imperialistic views he admired. Loye traveled with Laborde to various

execution Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that ...

s in Paris and the north of France. Loye had arrived as a student at the Sorbonne from a rural area southwest of Paris, and died shortly after completing his 1886 doctoral dissertation.

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* 19th-century French physicians French physiologists Academic staff of the University of Paris 1861 births 1890 deaths {{France-med-bio-stub

See also

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External links