[Cabanis before the guillotine]

In the beginning of "Year IV", Cabanis writes an Essay on the guillotine. Strangely enough, he advocated the scaffold against Soemmering and Süe on an argumented physiological ground, while he strongly condemns it from a political and moral standpoint. This ambivalence could be explained by the paradoxes of the culpability feelt by the humanist practitionner who had to represent the Paris Hospitals Commission when the machine to be the Great Terror's servant was tested, for the first time, by Louis, Guillotine and Pinel.