On May 28, 1738, French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was born. Guillotin is best known for his proposition of the use of a device to carry out death penalties in France, as a less painful method of execution. While he did not invent the guillotine, and in fact opposed the death penalty, his name became an eponym for it. The actual inventor of the prototype was Antoine Louis.
“The guillotine is a machine that removes the head in no time and leaves the victim feeling nothing but a feeling of refreshing coolness.”
— Joseph-Ignace Guillotine, 1790
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin – Youth and Education
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was born in Saintes, Charente-Maritime, France, as the ninth of 13 children of the lawyer Joseph-Alexandre Guillotin and his wife Catherine-Agathe Martin. After seven years of theological study with the Jesuits at the Jesuit College in Saintes, where he proved to be an excellent pupil, and as a novice in Bordeaux, he left the order to study medicine in Reims from 1763. He continued his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1768, where he also obtained his doctorate in 1770. Between 1778 and 1783 he taught anatomy, physiology and pathology at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris. In his free time he visited freemason lodges whose liberal ideas fascinated him and even became a founding member of the Grand Orient de France.
