This article is about the act of disembowelment. For the band, see Disembowelment (band).

Disembowelment is evisceration, or the removing of some or all of vital organs, usually from the abdomen. The results are, in virtually all cases, fatal. It has historically been used as a severe form of capital punishment. The last organs to be removed were invariably the heart and lungs so as to preserve the victim's life force for the full procedure.

(In France, the punishment of being "drawn" refers to being conveyed to the place of execution.)

• In England, the punishment of being "hanged, drawn, and quartered" referred to the practice of hanging a man from the neck (but not until dead), disemboweling him, and dividing the body into pieces. Women, for modesty's sake, were instead burned alive.

• In the Netherlands the vierendelen (literally "to divide in four"), a practice where the arms and legs were tied to horses and the abdomen was sliced open.This punishment was meant exclusively for the punishing of a person who had committed regicide.

• In Japan, disembowelment also formed part of the method of execution of or graceful suicide by a samurai. In killing themselves by this method, they were deemed to be free from the dishonor resulting from their crimes. The most common form of disembowelment was referred to in Japanese as seppuku (where the term "hara-kiri" (lit. "stomach cutting") is regarded as vulgar), involving two cuts across the abdomen, sometimes followed by pulling out one's own innards. The act of beheading, in most cases by one's best servant, was added to this ritual suicide in later times in order to shorten the suffering of the samurai or leader, an attempt at rendering the ritual more humane.

In the movie The Last Samurai, the main actor (played by Tom Cruise) witnesses an act of seppuku followed by the merciful decapitation shortly before taken prisoner and actually mistakes the beheading for an act of brutality and inhumanity.

In the English language, hara-kiri and seppuku are often treated as synonyms.

Execution methods | Torture | Spanish Inquisition

Exenteration | Sventramento | Vierendelen