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Inside the disturbing history of Chinese water torture and how it caused prisoners to go insane
Many have heard of Chinese water torture, the interrogation method that involves restraining a person and allowing water to slowly drip onto their head until they go insane. But few know the surprising history behind this chilling practice. For starters, no historian has ever found any evidence of water torture originating in China.
Instead, most experts point to a 15th-century Italian lawyer named Hippolytus de Marsiliis as the man who first documented the technique. He recorded the method after he observed that continuous drips of water slowly eroded pieces of rock and decided that the same practice could likely be applied to humans. But even though water torture has been around for hundreds of years — and has been used on countless prisoners — the term itself didn't appear in writing until 1892, long after it was first described.
Learn more about the disturbing history of Chinese water torture by clicking the link in our profile.
According to the New York Times Magazine, the torture method involves holding a person in place while slowly dripping cold water on their face, forehead, or scalp. The splash of water is jarring, and the victim experiences anxiety while trying to anticipate the next drop.
From the Vietnam War to the War on Terror, other methods of “enhanced interrogations” using water such as simulated drowning or waterboarding have largely sidelined general curiosity about Chinese water torture. But while scarce evidence of its actual implementation exists, Chinese water torture has a long and fascinating history
According to the Encyclopedia of Asylum Therapeutics, this form of water torture withstood the test of time, as it was used in French and German asylums in the mid-1800s. Some doctors at the time believed insanity had physical causes and that water torture could cure patients of their mental afflictions.
Convinced that a buildup of blood in the head caused people to go insane, these asylum workers used a “dripping machine” to alleviate internal congestion. Patients were restrained and commonly blindfolded before cold water was released upon their foreheads at regular intervals from a bucket above. This treatment was also employed to cure headaches and insomnia — naturally to no success.
It is unclear when the term “Chinese water torture” came into use, but by 1892, it had entered the public lexicon and was mentioned in a short story in Overland Monthly entitled “The Compromiser.” Ultimately, though, it was Harry Houdini who made the term famous.
In 1911, the famous illusionist constructed a water-filled tank in England that he called the “Chinese Water Torture Cell.” With both feet restrained, he was lowered into the water upside down. After onlookers observed him through the glass front of the tank, curtains veiled his miraculous escape. According to The Public Domain Review, he performed the trick for the first time in front of an audience on Sept. 21, 1912 in Berlin.
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