If a living person is disemboweled, it is invariably fatal without major medical intervention. Historically, disembowelment has been used as a severe form of
capital punishment.
Asia Vietnam Various accounts have asserted that during the
Vietnam War, members of the
Viet Cong sometimes made calculated use of disembowelment as a means of
psychological warfare, to coerce and intimidate rural
peasants. Peer De Silva, former head of the
Saigon department of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), wrote that from as early as 1963, Viet Cong units were using disembowelment and other methods of mutilation as psychological warfare. The extent, however, to which this punishment was perpetrated may be impossible to gauge and while detailed accounts survive regarding how civilians were disemboweled by Viet Cong, the use of this torture appears to have been quite arbitrary and there is no record that such actions were sanctioned by the
North Vietnamese government in
Hanoi. Disembowelment and other methods of intimidation and torture were intended to frighten civilian peasants at a local level into cooperating with the Viet Cong or discourage them from cooperating with the
South Vietnamese Army or its allies.
Netherlands On 10 July 1584,
Balthasar Gérard shot and killed
William of Orange, who had advocated for
Dutch independence from the
King of Spain. The assassin was interrogated and condemned to death almost immediately. On 14 July, after suffering various tortures during each of the five days since the assassination, Gérard was disemboweled and
dismembered while still alive, after which his heart was torn out and then he was beheaded by his Dutch executioners.
Roman Empire Christian tradition states that
Erasmus of Formiae, also known as Saint Elmo, was finally executed by disembowelment in about A.D. 303, after he had suffered extreme forms of torture during the persecutions of Emperor
Diocletian and
Maximian.
England , who was hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason in 1326 In
England, the punishment of being "
hanged, drawn and quartered" was typically used for men convicted of
high treason. This referred to the practice of dragging a man by a hurdle (similar to a fence panel) through the streets, removing him from the hurdle and (1) hanging him from the neck (but removing him before
death), (2) drawing (i.e. disembowelling) him slowly on a wooden block by slitting open his abdomen, removing his
entrails and his other organs (which were frequently thrown on a fire), and then
decapitating him and (3) quartering, i.e. dividing the body into four pieces. The man's head and quarters would often be
parboiled and displayed as a
warning to others. As part of the disembowelment, the man was also typically
emasculated and his genitals and entrails would be burned.
William Harrington, Hugh le Despenser the Younger and
William Parry are examples of men who were hanged, drawn and quartered – tortured on the rack,
hanged until not quite dead, subjected to emasculation, disembowelment and then chopped into quarters.
Germany From the 15th century, ordinances are retained that threaten with a terrible punishment those who stripped off the bark of a standing tree in the common woods. A typical wording is found in the 1401 ordinance from
Oberursel: In the 13th century, members of the now extinct Baltic ethnic group of
Old Prussians in one of the battles against the
Teutonic Knights, are said to have captured one such knight in 1248 and made him undergo this punishment.
Americas , folio 106R, painted roughly a century after Nezahualcoyotl's death
Nezahualcoyotl, a 15th-century
Acolhuan ruler of
Texcoco, a member of the
Aztec Triple Alliance (now
Mexico), promulgated a law code that was partially preserved. Those who had engaged in the passive role of homosexual anal intercourse had their intestines pulled out, then their bodies were filled with ash, and finally, were burnt. The active or penetrating partner was simply
suffocated in a heap of ash. ==Suicide==