May 28, 1738 - Joseph-Ignace Guillotin
His place here is one of history's more uncomfortable ironies: a physician who argued for humane reform ended up lending his name to the instrument most associated with the Terror's mass executions. The device he championed as a mercy — equal and swift for all condemned, regardless of class — became the emblem of revolutionary violence at its most systematic.
From Wikipedia
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (French: [ʒozɛf iɲas ɡijɔtɛ̃]) (28 May 1738 – 26 March 1814) was a French physician, politician, and freemason who proposed on 10 October 1789 the use of a device to carry out executions in France, as a less painful method of execution than existing methods. Although he did not invent the guillotine and opposed the death penalty, his name became an eponym for it. The actual inventor of the prototype was a French physician, Antoine Louis.
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