Morbid curiosity

I read a lot of Shaunta Grimes stories on Medium. To improve and reach a wider audience she suggested answering a question for 30 days on Quora. So far I've been scrolling but haven't responded.

While scrolling a question caught my attention  'Can you survive if your hands and feet were cut off?

 I watched a documentary on The History Channel about William Cromwell where ordered the hands and feet chopped off of peasants who rebelled against him. The consensus was that you might survive nowadays with medical attention but not then. There was an account of a Lord having his eyes, ears, and genitals removed and living out the rest of his days as a monk.

They thought this and other forms of torture were acceptable in warfare. To extract wealth from defeated Anglo Saxons they hung them by their hands or thumbs, hung fires on their feet, tied string about their heads, twisting until it got to their brains or squashed them in small boxes lined with sharps stones until their limbs broke. The Medival Times ( seems to be from the 5th to the 15th Century) torture was deemed to be acceptable for acts of treason. The Christian Church expanded this and tortured each other. They did this in secret and continued to do it after it was banned. Torturous executions, on the other hand, were a spectator sport, often declared a Public Holiday and free penances given out to encourage a crowd.

Flaying and forcing rats through a victims body referenced on Game of Thrones. Or Cersai's 'Walk of Shame.' For some reason I find it easier to watch that then the depictions on The Bastard Executioner nor could I follow the storyline as easily. I can watch when I get bloods taken, but this made me feel squeamish. I like Silent Witness, Vikings(more so the first series), Luther and Waking the Dead yet I find real-life violence unconscionable.

The Christian Church especially the Catholic Hierarchy was all for it. Sure they just forgave each other if they broke their rules. The Bamburg Trials, in Germany, took place between 1626 and 1631. Between 300 and 600 people executed, one of the greatest mass executions in peacetime. There had been famine, plagues and crop failures for which the Church was looking for a scapegoat. The Prince Bishop Gottfried Johann Gorge II Fuchs von Dornheim built a Witch House adorned with biblical quotes and contained a torture chamber.  A heartbreaking letter from the Burgmeister Johnanna Junious to his daughter details the horrors of the trials. His brother in law was one of the four who put him through the ordeal. He and his 'co-conspirators'  were tortured into implicating one another. Their confessions didn't save them. All were burnt to death

Hallucinagenics were used, possibly before torture, to either make them confess to being witches or somehow prove they were possed by demons. The drugs rendered people open to suggestion, delirious, blind and prone to convulsions. These symptoms were good propaganda for the Inquisitors so may have been more widely than was suspected.

We would like to think of torture as an outdated practice from when we were more primitive. Incidents have occurred during living memory. Tarring and feathering were meted out to suspected Drug Dealers in Northern Ireland in the 20th Century and a form of Water Torture was practised in Guantanamo Bay in the 21st Century. Socially sanctioned violence has become less acceptable . Maybe we are growing more empathetic? We don't condone hanging prisoners corpses publically in gibbits anymore.