Quote:
Originally Posted by A mysterious girl
Have you ever read the book titled "The citadel"? Something there reminds me of what happened to Wilt. A man got stucked by the arm in a mine and a doctor had to cut his arm with nothing but a knife, I don't mean that's what really happened to Wilt, what I mean is that it could be possible to remove someone's limb without using many tools. (Nevermind what happend on that book, I still believe that what the doctor did was too dangerous and that maybe, that's not possible at all).
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Before a means of safely anesthetizing patients was discovered, it WAS commonplace for doctors to amputate limbs with the patient fully concious. Of course, many such patients died of shock afterward, but many survived, also. The Grand Canyon here in the US was first explored and mapped by a Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell, whose right arm had been amputated following devastating injuries to it in battle. A couple of years ago, a hiker in one of our Western wilderness areas was pinned by the arm underneath a boulder in a rock slide, and he was alone at the time. He had to amputate his own arm with a camping knife to get free, otherwise he would have died there. He was a well-trained individual, though, who did have some medical background and had the equipment to create a tournequet to stem bleeding long enough for him to hike out to help. Regardless of whether Wilt's arm was amputated under "battleground" conditions, or in the relative safety of a contemporary operating room, it still would have been a rough thing to go through, all the worse if it was done by someone who DIDN'T use anesthetic. The fact that it was neatly sutured, and padded with muscle from elsewhere(most likely from those two scarred lobes on his face), indicates that it was done by a surgeon with experience in amputations, and most likely(this was the '70's, after all, and not in some remote wildnerness area, though some people DO think of the Southeastern US as a "wilderness")was done in the comparitive safety of a hospital OR, under general anesthesia.
pitbulllady