A friend is writing a fantasy story where the main character gets his hand chopped off for stealing. He wants a bit more detail on the procedure, such as what do they do to prevent the person from bleeding to death and sword/axe types. Most of the information out there seems to be where it’s done in the real world and the crimes for it. Anyone have any information?
well, nothing much to add except that the scenario is not so strange.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/europe/article3749762.ece
I always thought they stopped the bleeding by cauterizing the wound?
I’ve heard of cauterizing, usually by heating up metal or using a hot metal cutting instrument, and also by dipping the stump in hot tar, which seals the wound to prevent infection, as well.
If you cut off a hand sharply you can simply wrap it with a compressive bandage and it will stop bleeding on its own without much fuss. Applying hot irons, tar, etc actually sound pretty pointless to me. An amputation through the wrist just doesn’t bleed that much
It’s very, very difficulty to bleed to death from almost anything below the elbow unless you are on blood thinners or get a tangential cut to an artery, and even then it would take much longer than you might think.
I’m NOT going to give any links (partly because I don’t remember them anyway) but there are plenty of actual ‘arabs-cutting-off-thief’s-hands’ videos out there. Sometimes its chopped off quickly with a sword, sometimes sawed off (still pretty quickly) with a large knife. Surprisingly there isn’t usually a huge amount of blood with a hand. Be very wary of searching for these though, as you’ll also find things much, ***MUCH ***more graphic and unpleasant along with them… :eek:
Stuff that will haunt you forever even if you only see a few seconds of it. 
Cite please. 
Like I said, not a chance. Just put your search terms into Google (and make sure Safe Search is OFF) and you can find stuff fairly easily (that’s how I did)…
Why does slitting one’s wrist work for suicide? Or maybe, how long does it take to work?
Fascinating. But below-elbow territory gets it’s blood faithfully pumped all the time. Chop something off, the spigot is still open, right? And the pumping pressure–what?
Cross-cutting does not work. Up-down cutting takes forever, as it were. Empirical research.
Sorry. Was thrown off by the seriousness/icky-ness of the subject…