The guillotine is a contrivance for beheading condemned criminals. In 1792 the French Assembly decided, on motion of Dr. Guillotin, to adopt a beheading machine described by him. Dr. Guillotin deprecated the use of the sword or ax as open to accident and as brutal. He proposed to revive a machine formerly used in Scotland and Germany. A young German mechanic by the name of Schmidt was authorized to construct eighty-three of these new instruments, one for each department of France. The new machine was called a guillotine, after the name of the physician who recommended it. The guillotine consists of a heavy base, two upright posts, with a crosspiece at the top, and a heavy, weighted knife with an oblique edge. The knife slides in grooves of the upright posts. The knife is raised to the top of the grooves; the victim is strapped to a plank, face downward, so that his neck is directly beneath the knife; a spring is touched; the heavy, keen-edged knife descends, and the criminal's head is severed as easily as a sharp razor cuts a hair.
No one at the time had any idea that the guillotine would play so great a part in the horrors of the Revolution. Dr. Guillotin himself came very near being a victim of the instrument which bears his name. He was thrown into prisor during the reign of terror but was released on Robespierre's death and resumed the practice of medicine in Paris. He died in 1814.
