As we mark this anniversary, the question reemerges about the pain inflicted by guillotine death: was it a torment for the condemned? A doctor documented his observations of the beheading of a man known as “Languille” in the Criminal Anthropology Archives. Since the inception of this method, few scientific studies on its painfulness have been conducted—getting answers from a severed head is no small feat! To build on this, British neurobiologist Harold Hillman enlightens us with his study published in 1993 in the journal Perception. To support this, he cites experiments on sheep, which showed that “brain activity ceased 14 seconds after the carotid arteries were severed.”