Disembowelment

Categories: Death penalty | Torture | Spanish Inquisition

This article is about the act of disembowelment. For the band, see Disembowelment (band).

Disembowelment is evisceration, or the removing of some or all of vital organs, usually from the abdomen. The results are invariably fatal. It has historically been used as a cruel form of capital punishment. The last organs to be removed were invariably the heart and lungs so as to preserve the victim's life force for the full procedure.

(In France, the punishment of being "drawn" refers to being conveyed to the place of execution.)

• In England, the punishment of being "hanged, drawn, and quartered" referred to the practice of hanging a man from the neck (but not until dead), disemboweling him, and dividing the body into pieces. Women, for modesty's sake, were instead burned alive.

• During the Spanish Inquisition, allegedly the method of disembowelment was to cut a small hole in the victim's gut. The intestines are then drawn out slowly and carefully. The executioners kept the victim alive as long as possible during the process.

• In Japan, disembowelment also formed part of the method of execution of samurai. In killing themselves by this method, they were deemed to be free from the dishonor resulting from their crimes. The most common form of disembowelment was referred to in Japanese as seppuku (where the term "hara-kiri" is regarded as vulgar), involving two cuts across the abdomen, almost always followed by beheading. In the English language, hara-kiri and seppuku are synonyms, and hara-kiri is by far the more common usage.de:Exenteration