Hanging is a pretty childlike manner to kill someone . All you really want is a length of rope , someone who can bind a decent knot , and something from which to flow the victim . If you ’re make a fancier instruction execution , you could apparel things up with gallows and use the dupe ’s pinnacle and weight unit to figure out how much quagmire the rope necessitate to defeat them , but not take their head clean off — a common happening until British hangmanWilliam Marwooddeveloped the “ foresighted drop ” in 1872 . It ’s no - nonsense and versatile . dangling has been a favour method acting of execution for everyone from lynch mobs togovernmentssince at least the fifth century ( edit : BCE)(when the Persian noble Haman was hanged in the Bible’sBook of Esther ) .
Here ’s the affair , though . For as long as we ’ve been using it , we do n’t jazz what piddle hanging oeuvre so well .
for sure , we have a cosmopolitan idea of what ’s move on . abeyance hanging and curt drops strangle the victim , and standard drops and foresighted drops break the neck . Medically talk , though , that ’s a little vague . We do n’t always have sex what specifically is happening to the neck when it hail to a sudden stop at the end of a running noose .
seldom does it even come out to be the same thing from mortal to person . With some longer drops , one or more of the cervical vertebrae is severely fractured . With others , they ’re hardly damaged . Sometimes the spinal cord or the vertebral arteries are crushed and sometimes they are n’t . With some brusk , strangling drop , the airway is conclude or crushed . Sometimes it ’s spared , but insistence on the carotid arteria causes an arterial spasm , starve the head of line of descent .
Suddenly , hanging does n’t seem so simple anymore .
as luck would have it for the morbidly curious , a number of scientist have embraced the depressed job of contemplate suspension , some even going so far as to experiment on themselves . A grouping of researchers formed The Working Group on Human Asphyxiation ( WGHA ) in 2006 , and have since reviewed historical and medical texts ( the best stuff comes from between 1870 and 1930 , when hang was very in vogue in the U.S. and Europe ) , looked at the data point fromanimal experiments , and even analyzedfilmed human hangings , all in an effort to get to the bottom of what make hanging so effectual .
A little gruesome ? Sure , but the WGHA does n’t have anything on Nicolas Minovici . For his 238 - Thomas Nelson Page “ discipline on Hanging ” ( 1905 ) , the Romanian forensic scientist analyzed 172 hanging suicide and executions and then , to really get a feeling for it , attend himself .
Then he did it 11 more time .
