- Paul Loye
Paul Loye (born 1861, died 1890) was a French
physician and "préparateur" for various physiological courses at theSorbonne in the 1880s. His greatest contribution lay in his observations on the functions and organization of thebrain andnervous system .As a medical graduate student in
Paris , Loye attempted to confirm the observations ofCharles-Édouard Brown-Séquard on the nervous system. Brown-Séquard had argued that all motor activity rested in the brain and operated through the nervous system alone. To observe the importance of the brain in the activity of the body, Loye constructed aguillotine in the laboratory of the Sorbonne and decapitated several hundreddog s and other animals, recording the extent of each animal's movement afterdecapitation . Through these experiments, Loye concluded that the loss of completeconsciousness and braindeath occurred immediately after decapitation, but various parts of the body, such as theheart , continued to work for several minutes as areflex action . This confirmed the less-refined observations ofJean Baptiste Vincent Laborde who had experimented upon decapitated human heads in the early 1880s.Almost nothing is known of Loye's personal life. He once served as an assistant to the physiologist
Paul Bert , whose imperialistic views he admired. Loye traveled with Laborde to variousexecution s in Paris and the north of France. Loye had arrived as a student at the Sorbonne from a rural area southwest of Paris, and died shortly after completing his 1886 doctoral dissertation.References
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