Upon hearing the sad news of Gene Wolfe's passing in April of this year, I took the occasion to reread his Book of the New Sun series. The protagonist is Severian, a banished member of a Torturers guild, who earns some money during his travels by performing professional executions. It's a little unsettling to immerse yourself in a story written in the first-person narrative of this sort of character.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severian" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severian</a>
Here's an article about what it's like to be an executioner in the modern era (Saudi Arabia, 2003): <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20090911101207/http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1&section=0&article=27038&d=5&m=6&y=2003" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20090911101207/http://www.arabne...</a>
Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a medieval RPG, did this quite well. The protagonist Henry does a few jobs for the executioner and they make it clear the isolation and ostracization the executioner suffers, and he lives well out of town.
The Hangman’s Daughter book series gives a pretty great look into this same topic, dramatic flair aside. They’re written by a modern descendent of a Bavarian executioner family who dug into his family’s past and then loosely tied some actual historical events into clever stories (basically the definition of historical fiction, I suppose). They were fun beach reads for me that also taught me a lot about 1600s German life.
Not in the article, but in the book it self: there is also the function of combating superstition! Lots of people believed incredibly dangerous things. Such as cutting of the (arm or) hand of a new born (and carrying it when you attempt to burglar a house) can make you invisible. This believe was obviously quite dangerous for new borns. Thieves and burglars would sometimes “try their luck”. When they got caught it was the executioners job to also demonstrate/ educate the people.
It should be added that criminal law that time also meant that executed convicts had to be studied by the general public to inspect any inner deformations or sick organs which could have caused those crimes. So the executioner was also a pathologist who prepared a public autopsy in a special room after the execution. Or there was another special doctor who did that. Many executioners did the autopsy by themselves which raised their profile.<p>An excellent novel about he executioners business is Pavel Kohout's Katyne.
I went to the torture device museum show when I was in San Diego about a decade ago.<p>Seeing how cruelty was inflicted stays with you, so I don't recommend it unless you're studying that area.<p>The closest analogy is that once you see the goatsie picture, you can't unsee it.<p>At a higher level, learning how government abused punishment in the past does make you question whether they're any more qualified today.