I recall with satisfaction to a time when I was about 18. A family trip found me at a US Civil War battlefield and a curator was pointing at an old building she claimed to have been commandeered as a field hospital at some point after a particularly nasty battle. To shock the crowd she recounted written descriptions of how doctors would perform surgery as quickly as they could on the many wounded, hacking limbs off and simply tossing the discarding masses of flesh outside via the nearest window.

With news of the Iraq war and the record number of dismemberments because of the nature of fighting: why are people acting like it’s some new thing? The Civil War had a far higher rate of occurrence of amputees, and live body mutilation as a result of the nature of warfare. Are people really such big idiots? Like this MSNBC article http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4478134/ is probably just an attempt to gloss a cute “positive” story in the Iraq war. Really that’s the only positive news from the Iraq war that poor young folks (and yes, literally poor because of the bad pay) have some chance of retaining partial use their heavily damaged limbs. And those who’s limbs are completely disintegrated can use one of the thousands of new bizzare replacement body parts. The Civil War saw the development of Plastic Surgery as a discrete medical art. Many improvements to what we take for granted like crutches, wheelchairs, and the like.

The first time I learned about mastectomies I was probably about 12 or 13. This is a simple procedure where the female breast is hacked off usually because of some nominal malady like a cancerous infection. Thanks to Sports Illustrated and Monte Python’s: The Meaning of Life I had developed certain tastes. It was only at this point when I was 18 I could put the two together finally: having bad luck with procuring live visual events and the unappealing nature of expensive pay-form venues I reckoned there was a feasible alternative. My hometown was a regional center for health care in the Midwest, but was a relatively small city with a very laid back police and lax security at most commercial establishments. Needless to say how things went down, it certainly made me a happy boy.

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