#5: The Isolated Head of a Dog (Comments)

"Very well-researched and delivered in an engaging, breezy, wink-wink tone similar to that of Mark Leyner and Billy Goldberg's Why Do Men Have Nipples?, this will likely be enjoyed equally by science buffs and casual aficionados of the curious. One of the finest science/history bathroom books of all time."
-Kirkus Reviews

#5: The Isolated Head of a Dog

What could be more horrific than creating a two-headed dog? What about keeping the severed head of a dog alive apart from its body!

Ever since the carnage of the French Revolution, when the guillotine sent thousands of severed heads tumbling into baskets, scientists had wondered whether it would be possible to keep a head alive apart from its body, but it wasn't until the late 1920s that someone managed to pull off this feat.

Soviet physician Sergei Brukhonenko developed a primitive heart-lung machine he called an "autojector," and with this device he succeeded in keeping the severed head of a dog alive. He displayed one of his living dog heads in 1928 before an international audience of scientists at the Third Congress of Physiologists of the USSR. To prove that the head lying on the table really was alive, he showed that it reacted to stimuli. Brukhonenko banged a hammer on the table, and the head flinched. He shone light in its eyes, and the eyes blinked. He even fed the head a piece of cheese, which promptly popped out the esophageal tube on the other end.

Brukhonenko's severed dog head became the talk of Europe and inspired the playwright George Bernard Shaw to muse, "I am even tempted to have my own head cut off so that I can continue to dictate plays and books without being bothered by illness, without having to dress and undress, without having to eat, without having anything else to do other than to produce masterpieces of dramatic art and literature."

[On YouTube: See Experiments in the revival of organisms.]

Return to the Top 20 Most Bizarre Experiments of All Time
Total Comments: 55

Comments
Listed in chronological order. Newest comments at the end.

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Posted by mtrbijem on Tue Aug 19, 2008 at 07:30 PM

Did you know that in The Great Dane became the official State Dog _of Pennsylvania in 1965.
Posted by josh on Wed Sep 10, 2008 at 08:09 PM

Oh i fucking hope that we humans go extinct some time soon. Preferably before we kill off all of the other species on our planet.
Posted by Dan on Tue Sep 30, 2008 at 06:40 PM

Could this be any sicker?

I mean come on, poor dog, why use it as an experiment, they don't deserve such treatments you know.

what was that scientist thinking anyway?
Posted by Little Dog Bark Collars on Mon Nov 03, 2008 at 12:39 PM

okay. some ppl wrote comments like wow or ah. but think about it. this is creepy. keeping a severd dogs head alive. im not the person that wants to yell because its inhuman or somthing but i still think this is creepy. this was 70 years ago. y cant we keep ppl alive today?
Posted by nathan on Sun Nov 09, 2008 at 06:56 PM

also to answer to Alexander and Beatrix, oxygen was pumped into the blood that they used to pump into the dog.
Posted by nathan on Sun Nov 09, 2008 at 06:59 PM

Lets not forget that the worlds first Open Heart surgery was also accomplished through the use of experimentation on dogs.
Posted by Guglielmo Capucci on Mon Jan 05, 2009 at 05:32 AM

Of course this is possible - has anyone heard of a cardiopulmonary bypass machine. Millions of people are put on machines every year while heart surgery is performed. There is nothing preventing a similar experiment being performed on a person except for the stigma associated with a body-less head.
Posted by d j on Fri Mar 06, 2009 at 04:08 PM

Ok guys i know this might sound bizare but it is possible, and yes we did it. On my univeristy we used to demonstrate a Jar or more like a cubic aquarium filled with waterlike liquid. All blood vessels where connected to the artificial blood conduits, we managed to maintain monkey head alive as long as we needed to by providing its head with materials that head needed such as proteins, and other bio stuff, we used artificial hearth to pump blood and artificial lungs doe oxygen. And i must say that the head can survive as long as you sustain in with machines and it will be alive and with all brain functions. Tho we belive that doing the same on humans will not work for several reasons: brain might get shocked for its non body life and might die only if human is prepared for months for the process.
Posted by Biogen on Mon Apr 20, 2009 at 02:08 AM

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i agree with alexander, it would be impossible to actually keep a dogs head alive. First there is the problem of circulation. blood needs oxygen and after a certain period there is no way to restore it once it was lost. 2nd the dog could not perform the simply task of licking if it had no oxygen going to the brain. It looks like a hoax. im pretty sure that it is."
if you had watched the video, you would've seen thatt they had attached the head to an artificial circulatory system, wich oxyginated the blood then returned it to the head, therefor the dog did have blood flowing through its brain(sorry about my spelling) and this experiment was to show that we can keep alive heads, and transfer them, so if someone got theyre head cut off, we could keep it alive long enough to atach it to a body
Posted by roxasneo on Fri Sep 25, 2009 at 10:03 AM

The dog, it... it looks so sad...
Posted by Lise on Sun Nov 29, 2009 at 06:00 PM

That is so gross
Posted by David Stone on Thu Dec 31, 2009 at 11:17 AM

This was very cruel to the dog, people dont think about it enough. If humans did half the things to each other that we do to animals, words cant compare. This expirement just adds to the fact.
Posted by . . . on Fri Mar 04, 2011 at 08:09 PM

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