You’ve all heard the expression to rub salt into an open wound, but we doubt you’ve
ever seen that happen in real life or even heard about it as a form of torture. Well,
it’s happened, and we can tell you that the victims were not too happy about it.
Imagine the scene. A man is beaten with batons, his skin is shorn from his flesh
with various torture tools, but to top it off, his assailants pour salt in his those wounds.
The screams can be heard in the distance. Suffice to say, it hurt.
Ok, but why does it hurt? Let’s talk about that first.
In short, when you have open wounds your nerves are exposed. So, when the
sodium in salt hits those exposed nerves it causes them to misfire. The result is pain.
Now you might be thinking that rubbing salt in open wounds is a good idea,
after all, didn’t someone once tell you that doing that will prevent infection?
Word on the street hundreds of years ago was that rubbing salt on wounds wasn’t such a bad thing
at all. In fact, historians tell us that you can go back to Egyptian, Roman and Greek times
and there is evidence suggesting that saltwater was put on people’s wounds to help them,
not to further hurt them. Sure, there was pain, but the salt was deemed to have an antiseptic
quality. These days medical professionals do not condone this practice due to the fact that
there is bacteria in the salt. Rubbing salt in wounds can defeat the purpose.
When Europeans started sailing the high seas, rubbing salt in wounds worked in two ways.
One way is likely where the idiom came from. Imagine a sailor has transgressed on the ship
and he needs to be punished, that might mean that he would have been tied up and whipped, often
with the brutal cat o' nine tails. The British were particularly fond of this horrendous tool.
A serious flogging with one of these things could cause a lot of ugly welts to appear, and those
could easily become infected. So, what might happen next is the man would be doused in salty
seawater. This would be intensely painful – hence to make a situation even worse – but it might also
save his life so he could carry on sailing. Thanks to modern research, we know that
pouring salt water into wounds can expose a person to hundreds of kinds of bacteria,
including cholera. On top of that, a study in 2006 showed that doing such a thing can actually make
the wound more inflamed and slow down the healing process. So, while in the past medics might have
thought this was a good thing, it actually isn’t. Pouring salt in open wounds isn’t just painful but
it might also make matters worse. You might wonder, then,
does anyone do this in modern times. The answer is yes. We’ll start with recent
torture by salt in wounds and finish with the worst example we could find.
You all know that for a number of years ISIS committed awful atrocities across the Middle East.
This led to many intelligence and military agencies around the world hunting for ISIS
members, though sometimes the people captured for interrogation were innocent and definitely
not part of the world’s premier terror group. We can find one instance when an Iraqi army
officer cut the skin off the backs of a group of men accused of being ISIS members.
The next thing the officer did was fill the open wounds with salt. He then told them,
“We will soon put bullets in your heads.” That’s about the most modern case we can
find of this happening, although there’s no shortage of evidence of suspected terrorists being
interrogated by the CIA and allies in the Middle East, torture that sometimes led to broken bones,
missing teeth and death. The CIA did have an interrogation center in Afghanistan called the
“Salt Pit”, but while the prisoners were subjected to all kinds of horrendous torture; waterboarding,
electrocutions, hanged on hooks, mock executions, injected with drugs, it seems salt wasn’t used.
A similar thing happened recently at secret prisons in Yemen that were run by a Saudi-UAE
alliance. Reports from that prison state that men were flogged, electrocuted, their bones smashed,
beaten sometimes to the point of death. Another punishment was to beat a person and then fill
his open wounds with hot pepper and salt. If you go a little further back in time, there
was something called “Derby's dose.” This sounds really, really unpleasant, to say the least.
It was created by a British slave owner named Thomas Thistlewood. On May 25, 1756,
one of his slaves that he’d named Derby was caught eating young sugar cane stalks on a
plantation in Jamaica. Thistlewood wanted to teach the man a lesson, and so he introduced an utterly
barbaric punishment for Derby. This punishment would be metered out on others who were later
found eating what they were not allowed to eat, or on slaves that tried to make a run for it.
It consisted of beating the person first to the point that there would be open wounds.
To intensify the pain, chili pepper, lime, and salt, would be rubbed into those open wounds.
Not surprisingly, historians refer to this tyrant as a brutal sociopath. We know it happened,
and we know it happened a number of times, on top of other horrific punishments. The reason we
know this is because Thistlewood’s diaries still exist today. We’ve seen some of the entries. All
we can say is this was a truly evil man. Now you need to watch, “Chinese Torture
Chair - Worst Punishments in the History of Mankind.” Or, have a look at this…