Having studied Medieval Europe the answer is more often than you'd like, but not as often as you'd think. Also, the benefit of most torturing practices in Medieval times is that it pretty much killed you. There were some pretty nasty drink concoctions (i.e. 'Swedish drink' during the 30 years war) that were meant to torture you, but most of the time it was rape and mutilation, with not a lot of weird shit. It's one of the reasons the Inquisition gets mentioned at all is because they were one of the few people (and royal families) with the time and money to do weird torture stuff and even then it was pretty out of the ordinary. Most things were just wild execution methods (which was one of the reasons the guillotine was introduced, to universalize the execution method).

What's really wild is how things are today. At least back in the day you could go on hunger strike and try to starve yourself to death or go unconscious. These days they'll give you stimulants and force feeding tubes down your throat and hydration tubes up your ass. Horrible grotesque stuff that is all the worse because of how medicinal they pretend it all is.

[–] SeducingCamel@hexbear.net 2 points 10 months ago

Have you seen that video of mos def getting a feeding tube put in? Difficult watch honestly, the torture we're apparently capable of now is horrifying