watching a typical action movie - where you see the good guy snaps the bad guys necks and they drop like a piece of wood - I asked myself how fast dead would come in such a situation…
I wager, that if you cut/destroy the spinal cord at the neck your heart would stop beating and your loungs would stop oxigenating your blood … as a matter of fact you would drop like a piece of wood - but you wouldnt be dead
but wouldnt the head (brain, eyes, ears) be self sufficient for like 1-2 minutes more (until you probably fall unconcious of underoxigination)?
breaking your neck isn’t always fatal, is it? Aren’t there many people out there who have become disabled by a broken neck but they do, in fact, survive it.
As for those who don’t survive, it seems reasonable that death is not quite instantanous. The brain may function for several minutes before lack of oxygen shuts it down permentantly. I don’t know though.
The main difference between medieval and naval (“from the highest yardarm”) hangings and modern ones is the trapdoor drop. In medieval hangings the victim is slowly asphyxiated and hangs there, jerking wildly for 5-10 minutes.
In modern hangings, the function of the drop is to break their neck and knock them unconscious so they don’t feel the pain. However, it’s still the asphyxia that actually kills them. They still hang there for 5-10 minutes, but NOT jerking wildly.
The hangings of the German war criminals by American soldiers were botched because the Americans didn’t really know anything about it. The necks of some of them didn’t break, and everybody had to listen to the gagging and moaning sounds.
My husband is a private duty RN for a quadriplegic patient whose neck was broken when a tree fell on him. He has no use of his body from the neck down but he is alive. He does breathe on his own, without a respirator.
Guy I used to work with buggered off at noon to go skiiing when we had a good dump. Didn’t mention it to his wife. Next she heard from him he was in the ER with serious broken neck. Full recovery AFAIK, except for the marriage which didn’t recover. The SO of a second collegue was (is?) a resident at that hospital…EVERY doc there saw the xrays, and nobody would have bet he’d breath without a resperator, much less recover fully. She was pretty stunned to learn that she knew the patient, as the Xrays were shown to her annonymously.
Highly unlikely. When a nerve is stretched it fires, and as a result breaking the spinal cord causes all the nerves to fire, simultaneously. IOW the brain receives simultaneous input from every single nerve in the body. It can’t handle that and promptly reboots, ie passes out. It is so rare for anyone to sever their spine and remain conscious that it was believed until recently that it was impossible. There now seems to be some evidence that low severence, as in lower back, may be possible without complete unconsciousness, but breaking the neck and remaining conscious is still impossible AFAIK.
Juts to add to that the neck contains the blood pressure receptors that protect the brain from getting to much or toolittle blood. Stretch or compress those things and they send a signal to the brain telling you to lie down, rela fast. You can experience this if you stand up fast, with that lightheaded feeling. If the pressure change is great enough you simply faint. You can be sure that the pressure change associated with a rope brekaing your neck will be sufficient to trigger fainting.
In short, there’s no chance of remaining conscious if you break your neck from being hanged.