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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There are a lot of answers in here that are completely missing what I would consider to be the most important point.
If you’re going to amputate a limb on a live patient, and you want them to stay that way (alive, I mean), then you need to save enough skin to close the wound once you’re finished or the patient will almost certainly die from the resulting infection. If you just chop a limb off like a butcher, that leaves you with no skin to cover the wound. The cuts must be made in a manner that leaves you with flaps of skin and other tissue that are much longer than the remaining bone which can then be sutured closed to give the patient a closed barrier against infection and a real chance of *not* dying from sepsis.
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