[1] 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.
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.
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.