Paul Loye 3441512 224949572 2008-07-11T03:51:34Z Lightbot 7178666 Units/dates/other '''Paul Loye''' (born 1861, died 1890) was a [[France|French]] [[physician]] and "préparateur" for various [[physiology|physiological]] courses at the [[Sorbonne]] in the 1880s. His greatest contribution lay in his observations on the functions and organization of the [[brain]] and [[nervous system]]. As a medical graduate student in [[Paris]], Loye attempted to confirm the observations of [[Charles-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 a [[guillotine]] in the laboratory of the Sorbonne and decapitated several hundred [[dog]]s and other animals, recording the extent of each animal's movement after [[decapitation]]. Through these experiments, Loye concluded that the loss of complete [[consciousness]] and brain [[death]] occurred immediately after decapitation, but various parts of the body, such as the [[heart]], continued to work for several minutes as a [[reflex action]]. This confirmed the less-refined observations of [[Jean 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 various [[execution]]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== {{Unreferenced|date=June 2007}} <references/> {{DEFAULTSORT:Loye, Paul}} [[Category:French physicians]] [[Category:French physiologists]] [[Category:1861 births]] [[Category:1890 deaths]]