Chinese Water Torture: Too Much Blood

What happens when a doctor decides the cure for your insomnia is to strap you down and drip cold water onto your forehead for hours?

In this episode of Torture: A Dark History, Kevin Young and Dan Hourigan explore the strange and surprisingly murky history of Chinese water torture, a method that is far less Chinese than its name suggests.

We’ll travel back to Renaissance Italy and the stories surrounding Hippolytus de Marsiliis, then follow the mysterious history of water torture through Spain, European prisons, 19th century asylums, and American prisons. We’ll look at how something as simple as a single drop of water could become a method of psychological torture, as well as the bizarre medical theories that led doctors to use dripping water to treat headaches, insomnia, and supposed congestion of the brain.

Then we’ll find out how this method acquired the name “Chinese water torture,” why that name had more to do with Western ideas about the mysterious and threatening “Orient” than anything actually Chinese, and how Harry Houdini helped make the phrase even more famous with his Chinese Water Torture Cell.

And because this is Torture: A Dark History, Kevin and Dan bring their own darkly inappropriate humor to an episode where one tiny drop of water somehow becomes the most annoying alarm clock in human history.

If you’re interested in Chinese water torture, drip torture, Hippolytus de Marsiliis, Renaissance torture, psychiatric history, Victorian asylums, prison torture, Houdini, psychological torture, dark history, and the strange origins behind some of history’s most infamous torture methods, this episode is going to get under your skin one drop at a time.

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