To define killed, let us say the patient would die in less than a week without some sort of mechanical assistance like an artificial heart. I figure you could get rid of both arms and both legs, your outer ears, your junk and butt cheeks… Certainly both shoulder joints, including the clavicles, could go. I know much of the digestive tract could be removed because cancer patients have survived with resected bowels, etc. People live with one lung and one kidney. The liver and pancreas could probably be cut down if it was done by someone with knowledge of the physiology, so you didn’t totally eliminate any vital tissues. Could you remove the bones in your abdomen? There must be a limit where your diaphragm would no longer have a firm attachment, so you wouldn’t be able to draw a breath.
The … what?
Take off the arms as a bonus.
It’s only a flesh wound.
You didn’t mention the eyes, nose, teeth, tongue (in fact virtually the entire face), and probably certain areas of the brain.
You couldn’t eat unassisted without teeth and a tongue. On the other hand, if you were immobile you wouldn’t be able to eat either. So you would at least need enough remaining muscle to maneuver yourself to a plate of food and plop your face in it.
Apparently, you could choke someone and carry on an affair with no hands or legs.
A related question is, how little of your body would you need to survive, given heroic efforts at continuous medical intervention? Would it be a lot less than if you needed to go unassisted?
IANAD, but my guess is you’re going to need a minimum of brain, heart and lungs or else your “quality of life” is going to be just above piss poor.
Have you, perchance, read Ray Bradbury’s classic short story, Skeleton? If not, [Arnold]do it! Do it now![/Arnold]
Depends on what you consider “life”, and for how long. Everything below the neck? There have been experiments…
There is certainly a lot of stuff inside us that we can live without. In addition to the mentioned, there’s our breasts (yes, men have breast tissue too), appendix, spleen, gall bladder, most of the stomach and intestines and lower set or two of ribs.
The real problem though, is that the body doesn’t like it when you remove a lot of stuff at once. It can cause catastrophic issues with maintaining blood pressure and blood sugar levels, as well as electrolyte balance. If you really went in and removed everything superfluous in one procedure, your patient is probably going to die of a cardiovascular incident, not directly from not having their organs anymore.
And Stephen King’s Survivor Type.
Need answer fast?
Limbs, including pelvis and shoulder girdle/scapula (includes sex organs). Remove the mandible and maxilla along with eyes, nose, pharynx, tongue, and extensive soft tissues of the neck including the musculature. Perform a tracheal diversion and remove larynx and one lung. Remove esophagus and stomach and place a duodenal feeding tube. Remove colon and place ileostomy and ileal conduit for GI and renal diversion respectively. One kidney, spleen, gallbladder, and half of the pancreas can go. The liver can be partially resected but will regenerate to some degree. The length of small intestine can be tuned later to minimize length depending on your acceptance of side effects (hah!). If all you want is respiration and a stable heartbeat, a lot of the brain can go too.
Hey, that was my favorite project after divorcing my wife a few years ago (Feeling much better). I always wondered how much I could physically torture someone whilst keeping her alive. Adrenaline was my go-to. Cite? Need answer not fast.
ISTR that one of the James Bond books (the original stories by Flemming) had a list of bits a human body can lose without dying. It included
- 1 kidney
- 1 lung
- appendix
- part of the liver
- part of the intestines
And the Oz books.
Johnnie Got His Gun, the most frightening book I ever read (from 1938), Dalton Trumbo.
You’re one sick fuck, and I mean that in a good way.
Yes, but, aren’t you leaving a lot of meat on the bone (so to speak)?
You can get by with, say, one kidney, if you are a normal person. But if you lost most of your body, you could get by with much less than one whole kidney, couldn’t you? In fact, might it not be easier to survive, because you’d have a closer match to a proper load for the remaining kidney tissue? Well, I don’t know if you can remove parts of a single kidney in particular, but in general, any organ from which some portion can be removed becomes a candidate for - ahh - thrift.