Humans have always been obsessed with performing weird experiments on animals, especially dogs. One of the strangest animal tests ever conducted was on a bodyless dog head.
In 1928, Sergei Brukhonenko developed an outlandish heart-lung machine called an autojector, which kept a dog’s bodyless head alive. At an international scientific conference, the machine was showcased to the world. Several scientists who claimed to have seen the film’s experiments stated that the severed dog head only survived for a few minutes, not the hours as claimed in the film.
I’m 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.
George Bernard Shaw commented on Brukhnenko’s decapitation experiment:
Brukhonenko did not stop there. His experiments continued. He also developed a new version of the autojektor that can be seen at the Bakulev Scientific Center of Cardiovascular Surgery’s Museum of Cardiovascular Surgery today. Brukhonenko was posthumously awarded the prestigious Lenin Prize.
In 1959, a Soviet scientist, Vladimir Demikhov, also conducted a similar experiment in which he attached a small dog’s upper body to a large dog’s neck.
