Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, French Physician
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (May 28, 1738 - March 26, 1814) was a French physician and lawmaker and, contrary to popular belief, was not the inventor of the machine. In 1790 proposed that the death penalty should be equal for all, regardless of social rank and nature of the crime. As a member of the assembly he directed his attention towards medical reform, and in 1789, during a debate on capital punishment, that he proposed that the criminal should be decapitated by means of a simple mechanism that beheads painlessly. The National Assembly assigned the task of designing and building Dr. Guillotin's machine to Antoine Louis, who hired a German harpsichord maker named Tobias Schmidt to actually construct it from his design. He became one of the first French doctors to support Edward Jenner's discovery of vaccination and in 1805 was the President of the Committee for Vaccination in Paris. He also founded one of the precursors of the National Academy of Medicine. He died in 1814 at the age of 75. The association with the guillotine so embarrassed his family that they petitioned the French government to rename it. When the government refused, they instead changed their own family name.
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