WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: A Brief History of Disembodied Dog Heads
Published by n1kk1 September 20th, 2006 in Uncategorized. Tags: No Tags.A Brief History of Disembodied Dog Heads
Did Soviet scientists actually keep a disembodied dog head alive back in the 1940s? Did those crazed Stalinist Frankensteins then follow up that stunt by surgically creating a two headed dog in 1954? (That is, if “two-headed” is accurate - it’s more like two heads, six legs and one-and-a-half torsi.)
Sorry, I just wanted to use the word “torsi.”
And forget the Soviets - what about the monkey brain that a Cleveland surgeon transplanted from one primate to another? Are these all Internet hoaxes, or the only known evidence of a subject too taboo to be taken seriously - the research into head and brain transplants that’s been going on for decades?
I wish I had definitive answers for you - I don’t. But I’m more inclined towards believing that these experiments actually took place than when I first stumbled onto this weird medical sub-culture. After starting off as a skeptic, I’ve come to believe that organisms have indeed been revived. Heads have been lopped off. Brains have been perfused. Cephalic members transplanted. Glucose permeated in isolated canine craniums. The works.
This all started a few weeks back, while browsing through the Prelinger archives. I came across the movie Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, which purports to show a 1940 Soviet experiment in which a dog’s head was kept “alive” after being removed from its body. [download video, 49 meg mp4 file]. If you haven’t seen this yet, be careful - it’s not for the squeamish. And I might as well say upfront that I’m against the removal and reanimation of heads, even for scientific or culinary purposes. Fascinating though it may be, it amounts to torture. It’s one thing to keep a dog’s lungs pumping outside of it’s deceased body, and quite another to maintain consciousness and pain receptiveness in a disembodied head. Maybe the imagined horror of this is what has kept this research relegated to the status of science fiction and hoaxology for so long.
WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: A Brief History of Disembodied Dog Heads