Nicolae Minovici was a Romanian scientist who was obsessed with finding out what happens to the human body during a hanging. In fact, he wrote an essay in which he analyzed almost 200 cases of people who had been hanged, and the factors that influenced, such as the type of knot of the rope, the weight and even the gender of the person.
Minovici, he was not happy with just "reading" about people who had been executed in this way, he wanted to know how he really felt, so he started a series of quite strange experiments and above all dangerous.
First he did some preliminary tests with a rope that did not contract, he hung himself 6 times a few seconds to get used to it, but as Minovici himself wrote in his notes:
"The pain was almost intolerable"
Still, he was determined to experience what it felt like to be hanged, so he leveled up.
He and some of his collaborators put their heads in a regular contraction rope and asked an assistant to hang them, twelve times in a row.
He also performed choking experiments on volunteers by applying pressure on their carotid arteries and jugular veins for up to five seconds, until the faces of his subjects became red. During their post-experiment accounts, the volunteers recounted experiences such as vision problems, heat sensation in the head, as well as paraesthesias such as a tingling and numbing sensation in multiple places of their bodies.
When describing previous experiments, Minovici repeatedly apologizes saying that "despite all his courage, he could not endure the experiment for more than three or four seconds."
Despite his efforts, Minovici failed to find tangible results from his series of hangings, which in total numbered almost a dozen. Nicolae Minovici died at the age of 73 in 26 June 1941 from an illness affecting his vocal cords.
Footnotes
Nicolae Minovici: The Man Who Hanged Himself Repeatedly To Study Death!
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