Inspired by the thread on extreme surgical procedures:
I wonder, could a decapitated head be kept alive and functioning by connecting it to medical equipment? I’m thinking of connecting the veins and arteries to an external pump, oxygenating the blood artificially, feeding the head intravenously and so on.
I realise that in practice you couldn’t connect everything up in time to stop the head dying, but ignoring that, is medical science up to the task of keeping a human head alive?
"Bodies are decapitated; heads are disembodied." –Spy magazine, ca. 1993, in reply to a letter complaining about the unannounced appearance in its pages of a “decapitated head”.
I’m sorry, I don’t have an answer to your question, other than that I suspect medical science could not keep a head minus its body alive.
The OP’s name seems really fitting for this thread topic.
I do seem to remember seeing a video of a disembodied dog’s head being kept alive. I’m not sure if that was ruled a hoax, though. (And no idea about disembodied human heads.)
There is the world’s most frightening video of a monkey whose head was decapitated and kept alive via a second monkey’s circulatory system. I’m having problems finding the video, but you will thank me if I don’t actually find it. I suppose you could do it with a heart lung machine instead.
You’re right, of course :smack: . And what makes it annoying is that that’s *precisely *the sort of nitpick that I usually spot when someone else gets it wrong.
I would say the technology to do this for a short while exists now, and that a conscious state could be obtained using a head perfused via a heart/lung machine.
There is no problem connecting up everything in time–we stop hearts all the time and hook people up onto external pumps during surgery. Nothing in principle would prevent decapitating a body using the major sets of arteries and veins which supply the head.
Current technology relies partly on cooling to keep the brain viable for any extended period of time on external pumps. A cooled brain would not have normal consciousness so there would only be a fairly short window of time if you warmed up the brain… Moreover the delicate balancing act required to keep blood thin enough to avoid clotting is very difficult to manage over time. People on external pumps (such as during bypass) tend to have neurologic problems that increase as pump time increases–probably micro strokes (local clots or bits of clotted blood that have been carried downstream and plugged up small vessels) which accumulate over time.
Saving Hitler’s brain again?
Tsk-tsk-tsk…
I saw this show called “Mythbusters” and they…
Just kidding 
You have to be talking about more than just supplying the brain with oxygen. The lungs are just one of many organs involved in sustaining life. You would need to be able to control any number of homeostatic systems.
I have not heard of any living body part or organ being kept alive for an extended period of time so my guess is that the same would be true for a head. You could probably do it for a while (day(s)) but not for a long term.
It would be neat to try. Any volunteers?
I saw a show on Discovery, or something of the like, where a boy was struck by a car and decapitated(so they said) and survived. His head wasn’t removed entirely from his body though,I don’t even think his skin was broken,but they did call it decapitation due to the internal injury.
Wish I could remember more about it.
Any one see that?
I want to see the monkey video! 
This is not possible, so they must have been talking about a complete separation of a couple of vertebrae, or else the first vertebra with the skull–not a separation of the soft tissues…
I heard about the same story, it was said that the boy suffered an internal decapitation but managed to survive and is making quite good progress.
Found the story:
http://www.defrance.org/artman/publish/printer_869.shtml
However, he admitted that he’s just a little nervous about what the future holds.
If I remember the monkey experiments correctly, they only lasted a couple of days and they were “alive” only in the clinical sense most of that time. They couldn’t do much monkey stuff. The whole thing was planned as well so you couldn’t do that with an accident victim. The brain would be long gone by the time it even got to the hospital let alone have a cutting edge team of surgeons ready to try an experiment on it. The answer is no as long as we are talking about anything meaningful in the real world.
There’s a book called If We Can Keep a Severed Head Alive…Discorporation and U.S. Patent 4,666,425 which was written by a man who obtained a patent on a device which would theoretically do so. He never followed up on it.
But his most important parts weren’t severed. His ligaments and his skull were. But one assumes his nerves, blood vessels, etc. weren’t.
That patent is the first thing I thought of too…
No, Jan in the Pan.
Right, heads, by themselves, can’t fling feces around…