In Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish he argues that over the past 200 years the emphasis of western justice has shifted from punishing the body to punishing the soul. To support this he cites a number of shifts in the culture, though the most stark example is easily the changing attitude toward torture. He begins his book by citing an exceptionally gruesome execution from 1757 in France in which a man who attempted to murder the king was publicly carted to the execution site where he then had pieces of flesh torn away with red hot pincers. He then had a mixture of molten sulfur and other compounds poured onto the wounds before being drawn-and-quartered. (In this case, however, the horses used were not typically used for such purposes, so they failed to sever his limbs on the first try, so two horses had to be added, which also failed. They then had to cut through all of the skin around the bones so that only the ligaments were holding the victim in place. When that was done, the horses were finally able to pull him apart.)
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