With all its bones broken, it will be pliable. You use the wheel to break every bone in his body. You lay the victim on the ground with blocks of wood at strategic points under his shoulders, legs, and arms. ![]() You take an ordinary wheel, a heavy wooden wheel with spokes. Every opening exists to be stuffed, all flesh to be carved off the bone. The human body is like foodstuff, to be grilled, pounded, filleted. The secret of torture, like the secret of French cuisine, is that nothing is unthinkable. For the torture here posed to be sleep deprivation. If you were Ippolito Marsili, the inventor of this torture, known as the Judas cradle, you could tell yourself you had invented something humane, a torture that worked without burning flesh or breaking bones. You could suspend a person over a pointed wooden pyramid and whenever he started to fall asleep, you could drop him onto the point. If you wanted to make it worse, you could heat the spikes. You could put a person in a chair with spikes on the seats and arms, tie him down against the spikes, and beat him, so that every time he flinched from the beating he drove his own flesh deeper onto the spikes. If you wanted to burn someone to death without hearing him scream, you could use a tongue lock, a metal rod between the jaw and collarbone that prevented him from opening his mouth. Then, if you wanted to finish him off, you and your helper could jump on his stomach, causing internal hemorrhage. Then, you could stop up his nostrils and force water into his stomach through his mouth. You could stretch him out backward over a thin piece of wood so that his whole body weight rested on his spine, which pressed against the sharp wood. This was the twisting stork, a benign-looking object. You could tie him up in an iron belt that held the arms and legs up to the chest and left no point of rest, so that all his muscles went into spasm within minutes and he was driven mad within hours. If you hold the victim upside down so the blood stays in his head, hold his legs apart, and start sawing at the groin, you can get as far as the navel before he loses consciousness.Įven in the Middle Ages, before electricity, there were many things you could do to torment a person. If you want to saw your victim down the middle, for example, all you need is a slightly bigger than usual saw. You don't need complicated machinery to cause incredible pain. But in addition I saw tongs, thumbscrews, a rack, a ladder, ropes and pulleys, a grill, a garrote, a Spanish horse, a Judas cradle, an iron maiden, an Inquisitor's chair, a breastbreaker, and a scourge. Or the headcrusher, which breaks first your tooth sockets, then your skull. The simple pincer, let's say, which rips out flesh. Otherwise there's no accounting for the number of torture instruments. ![]() It made me think that pain must be as great a challenge to the human imagination as pleasure. In a gallery off the rue Dauphine, near the parfumerie where I get my massage, I happened upon an exhibit of medieval torture instruments.
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