One day in May 1738, legend has it, a woman approaching the end of her pregnancy was walking down a street in Saintes, France, when she heard the cries of a man being executed on the town's breaking wheel. (The condemned would be tied to a large wheel, limbs stretched into a starfish, and then beaten with a club to break the bones.) So traumatic were the man's screams, the story goes, that the woman went into labor right then and there.
The circumstances, if true, were fitting for the person that came into the world that day. As the French historian Daniel Arasse wrote, “the conditions of his birth determined his later renown”—the baby, Joseph Ignace Guillotin, would grow up to invent one of the deadliest instruments of execution of his time.
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