Today’s Writhing Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
A British soldier who was flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails in 1832 described what he suffered:
I felt an astounding sensation between the shoulders under my neck, which went to my toe-nails in one direction, and my finger-nails in another, and stung me to the heart, as if a knife had gone through my body… He came on a second time a few inches lower, and then I thought the former stroke was sweet and agreeable compared with that one… I felt my flesh quiver in every nerve, from the scalp of my head to my toe-nails. The time between each stroke seemed so long as to be agonizing, and yet the next came too soon. The pain in my lungs was more severe, I thought, than on my back. I felt as if I would burst in the internal parts of my body…
I put my tongue between my teeth, held it there, and bit it almost in two pieces. What with the blood from my tongue, and my lips, which I had also bitten, and the blood from my lungs, or some other intertnal part, ruptured by the writhing agony, I was almost choked, and became black in the face… Only fifty had been inflicted, and the time since they began was like a long period of life; I felt as if I had lived all the time of my real life in pain and torture, and that the time when existence had pleasure in it was a dream, long, long gone by.
Culled from: The History Of Torture
Somehow this awesome video by Esben and the Witch that Abigail sent me the other day came to my mind when reading that last paragraph. Can’t imagine why…
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP0Nv_ivTaw[/tube]
I guess we tend to forget that serious, professional flogging wasn’t just about striping the skin.