When amputation surgery was a matter of holding the patient down with something to bite on and sawing through the limb as fast as possible, many patients survived. Why did everyone not die from loss of blood?
Tourniquet - must be removed soon, or else tissue below the ligature starts to die.
Cautery - can burning really seal an artery until natural healing has taken over?
Pressure padding - only slows bleeding.
I can give you a partial answer I got from a lecture years ago. One factor was the element of speed.
Just before an amputation took place in an operating theater the students would pull out their watches.
One surgeon got so involved in an amputation that he inadvertanly also removed a couple of his own fingers.
It was not unusual to remove a limb in 20 to 40 seconds.
This is what I remember from the lecture.
Who wants to pick it up from there?
Luck. Also keep in mind that the reason speed was so important is the patient was awake and painkillers consisted of getting him/her as drunk as possible.
I believe that aboard ship, you could seal the site with tar.
You didn’t have to be on a ship to use tar, you know. 
If I’m not mistaken, they put the tourniquet as close as possible to the cut. There wasn’t anything below the tourniquet you wanted to keep. At any rate, that’s how it’s described in books I’ve read, most notably the Hornblower novel “Ship of the Line”.
I seem to recall that that would cut off the blood flow with a tourniquet before surgery, but once they’d severed the limb they would tie off just the artery itself with thread.
Steven G. Friedman’s A History of Vascular Surgery, is a book-length treatise on this subject.
Paré used a surgical clamps on the blood vessels during the ligature.
If you want to follow up and get a good read on the subject of surgery, I recommed The Century Of The Surgeon by Jurgen Thorwald.
From the cite:
I’m not sure if anyone had any amputations during “Ship of the Line” (well, not counting one particular one, but I don’t think we’re counting French cannonballs as surgical instruments here). I believe there WAS an amputation done during “Beat to Quarters” after a cannon fell on someone’s legs, and “Flying Colours” may have had an amputation described (they did go into great detail regarding ligatures and fitting an amputee’s leg stump for a peg, even going so far as to describe the smell of a ligature ready to be removed. Let’s just say that whole scene made me shift uncomfortably when I read it :eek: )
I recall in one of my classes a description of amputations during the Civil War. I think it came up because one of the famous microbiologists we were talking about got his start hacking off legs on the battlefield, and he became very very good at it. Well, he got good at doing it quickly - survival was still tricky. Anyway, when it got really busy, he’d keep a few shovels in a fire to keep them hot enough to cauterize, then use those to take off the legs at the knee or hip.
:eek:
Details, details, please!
Is the scene being referred to Bush’s amputation? That was definetly him when they were talking about a peg being fitted.
Remember the movie “Misery”? Annie Wilkes chops off Paul Sheldon’s foot and then cauterizes it with a blowtorch.
Survival from any but the most minor surgery was problematic at any time. However, the recovery rate in the Civil War was atrocious. Anesthesia had been in use for quite a while so that surgeons could do extensive surgery but antiseptic methods were still a couple of years in the future. Many patients had pretty good surgical work done on wounds only to die of infection resulting from bacteria introduced by the surgeon.
I remember quite clearly the doctor (or whoever) giving the strings from the ligatures an experimental tug every so often until they came out. And the smell of “laudable pus”, as opposed to gangrene I suppose.