The AFU and Urban Legend Archive
Medical
 decapitated head blinking




[ ] Guillotined persons remain conscious long enough to blink. <Is this a "T" or a Tb"?>

I consulted Dr. Ron Wright, most recently Chief Medical Examiner of Broward County Florida. His response to me was: 

        After your head is cut off by a guillotine you have 13 seconds
        of consciousness (+/- 1 or 2).  The first time I ever learned
        this was when I put a patient into ventricular fibrillation.
        The "no blood pressure" alarms came on and the patient said
        "what is that?"  I said I suppose you will find out soon
        enough, and he did.
 
        The 13 seconds is the amount of high energy phosphates that the
        cytochromes in the brain have to keep going without new oxygen
        and glucose.  This is reasonably well known to the forensic
        community, but not often found in the literature.  I believe I
        touched upon it in one of my articles on asphyxia. At any rate,
        not only can you blink, but you can do two for yes and one for
        no; and it is said to have been done.

[T] Snowmobilers lose their heads over a shortcut.

Dr. Wright previously held a Medical Examiner position in Vermont. He related to me that in his tenure there, he had conducted at least three postmortems on beheaded snowmobilers. Their fates were the results of wires strung between trees at head-height. He commented on "how far the {snowmobile and trunk} goes before it stops"....

One can realistically assume the wires were installed by those private landowners upset over trespassing by snowmobilers, but there is no direct proof of that assertion.

..................
Source: email & person conversation with: R.K. Wright MD JD rkw@xanadu.ftl.fl.us -- 

A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com
& no one will talk to a host that's close...........(v)301 56 LINUX
Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433
is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433



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