Jean-Joseph Sue, the librarian at the Paris School of Medicine, declar[ed] his belief that the heads could hear, smell, see, and think. He tried to convince his colleagues to undertake an experiment whereby "before the butchery of the victim," a few of the unfortunate's friends would arrange a code of eyelid or jaw movements which the head could use after the execution to indicate whether it was "fully conscious of [its] agony." Sue's colleagues in the medical community dismissed his idea as ghastly and absurd, and the experiment was not carried out. Nonetheless, the notion of the living head had made its way into the public consciousness and even popular literature.Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers receives:
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