Special Guest Blogger: Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin

I don't know if you have ever tried to kill someone but if you have you will know that they don't just wait patiently for it to happen, they kick and fight and struggle and that can generally get quite messy if you are trying to behead them which can take a few whacks to get the job done so as a relatively well known Parisian physician and opponent of capital punishment, i suggested that criminals be used as subjects in medical experiments rather than be put to death.
That received a big fat 'Non' so i began giving some thought to a process where if i could not convince my countrymen that chopping off heads wasn't a nice thing to do, we could at least make it more humane and reduce the cleaning bill of the crowd in the first three rows of executions and considered an updated version of the Halifax Gibbet, a device the English had used where the victim was placed in the stocks and an axe on a pivot fell, lopping off the head.
My version had a simple mechanism with a heavy blade that would fall and dispatch the head cleanly first time every time and a prototype was built and when it's test sent the head of a convicted highwayman tumbling into the waiting basket, my 'machine that cuts people's heads off' as i called it was given the name the Guillotine after me (they added an e to the end of the name to make it feminine and called it Madame La Guillotine) and it was officially adopted by the French government and became a fixture in the streets of Paris during the Reign of Terror as did the tricoteuses, the women who knitted busily while the heads rolled.
Towards the end of the Reign of Terror, a letter from the Count Comte de Méré to me fell into the hands of the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville in which the Count, who was to be executed, commended his wife and children to my families care. The authorities demanded i inform them of the whereabouts of the Count's wife and children. As i refused to give the information, i was arrested and imprisoned and this is where things got a bit confusing because while i was in prison, a doctor named Guillotin was indeed executed by the guillotine but he was Dr J.M.V. Guillotin, a doctor from Lyon whereas i was released without charge in the general amnesty after Robespierre fell from power and i went on to support the discovery of vaccinations and was the chairman of the Central Vaccination Committee in Paris.
I actually died at home from a septic boil but the association with the 40,000 deaths attributed to Madame La Guillotine so embarrassed my family that they petitioned the French government to rename it but when the government refused they decided to change theirs instead.