Sergei Brukhonenko, The Russian Scientist Who Decapitated A Dog
Wikimedia CommonsBrukhonenko’s bizarre and twisted experiments led to the first autojektor, an early heart and lung machine.
The work of the early galvanists was largely set aside after the 1820s. Even Ure seems to have abandoned his work in favor of temperature regulation and Bible prophecy. The Soviet Union, however, evidently didn’t feel the same constraints when it came to the subject of mad science.
By the early 1920s, even before the Russian Civil War had ended with a Bolshevik victory, one Russian scientist was back at it. Except this time, he was getting results.
Sergei Brukhonenko was a physician living in Russia during the Revolution who invented what he called an “autojektor,” or a heart and lung machine. While Brukhonenko’s design was fundamentally sound, the way he tested it raised ethical questions.
During his early experiments, Brukhonenko decapitated a dog and immediately connected it to his machine, which drew out blood from the creature’s veins and circulated it through a filter for oxygenation. According to his notes, Brukhonenko kept the dog’s severed head alive and responsive for over an hour and a half before blood clots built up and killed the animal on the table. These experiments were documented in the 1940 film Experiments in the Revival of Organisms and showcase many of Brukhonenko’s tests.
This wasn’t strictly reanimation — but it was Brukhonenko’s stated purpose to eventually learn how to revive fallen Soviet men on behalf of the state.
According to the Soviet Congress of Science, Brukhonenko actually managed this feat in 1930. Brukhonenko’s team connected the corpse of a man who had died by suicide several hours earlier to the autojektor and pushed a witches’ brew of odd chemicals into his bloodstream.
The man’s chest cavity was open, and the team allegedly got his heart beating again. The story goes that the scientists had just developed a steady heart rhythm when the dead man started groaning like a real Frankenstein. At that point, everybody panicked and shut down the experiment, letting the man die for good.
All things considered, it was probably for the best.
