Was just reading on pre 20th century amputations and how they strived to be as fast as possible, cutting through bone and all.
Why didn’t they just amputate at the joint, like a butcher cuts pork or beef? That would have been way faster than sawing off though bone.
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Some doctors realised that there was a link between quick amputations and a chance to live. Infamously, [Robert Liston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Liston#Liston’s_most_famous_case) was once so zealous in his speed of amputation that as well as the patient’s leg, he also took with it several of his assistant’s fingers and the coat tails of a spectator.
The patient died, the assistant later died of gangrene, and the spectator was so convinced that he had also been cut that he died of shock. It’s the only known operation that has had a 300% mortality rate.
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There are many other reasons why you’d want to minimise the speed a surgery takes (i.e. most surgeons want to cut precisely for innumerable reasons), but without precision tools, such speed and precision was difficult – usually you’d need to pick one, and most surgeons opted for precision.
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