Doctor Joseph Guillotin was a reformer and compassionate public representative in the days leading up to the French Revolution. It’s too bad that he’s remembered in the name we give the head-chopping instrument by which so many of France’s revolutionary victims perished so publicly. He didn’t invent the thing and he didn’t die by the thing, although another doctor with the same last name did.

When the guillotine was invented it was at first called the Louisette, or Louison because one of the guys who did invent it was named Antoine Louis and he was secretary of the Academy of Surgeons of France.

Doctor Joseph Guillotin got into the act because he proposed a new government law that would mean that it wasn’t just the French nobility who could benefit by having their heads cut off, but it should be a right of every French citizen.

Hmmm.

That doesn’t sound quite right does it?

Well what it meant was that beheading was thought of as a quick and noble way to die, if the machinery of justice had decided that you had to die. But that up until that point the common Joe, or Joseph, didn’t have the right to die so nobly. Instead they were hanged, or burnt at the stake, or tortured to death. So this beheading thing was in fact a real step forward. Doctor Guillotin also took into account the failings of the human executioner. How many times had people hoped to have that axe fall once and be done with it, only to have…oh, I can’t go on. So part of Doctor Guillotin’s legislation included the need for such a beheading to be performed by a machine.

So he really was a nice guy; even if more than 1200 French citizens on the wrong side of the revolution might not have agreed.