The Atlantic Monthly has a fascinating
piece on
apotemnophilia, the neurological/psychological condition that causes one
to want to have healthy limbs amputated.
In May of 1998 a seventy-nine-year-old man from New York traveled to Mexico
and paid $10,000 for a black-market leg amputation; he died of gangrene in a
motel. In October of 1999 a mentally competent man in Milwaukee severed his
arm with a homemade guillotine, and then threatened to sever it again if
surgeons reattached it. That same month a legal investigator for the
California state bar, after being refused a hospital amputation, tied off her
legs with tourniquets and began to pack them in ice, hoping that gangrene
would set in, necessitating an amputation. She passed out and ultimately gave
up. Now she says she will probably have to lie under a train, or shoot her
legs off with a shotgun.
Some wannabes are also devotees. Others who identify themselves as wannabes
are drawn to extreme body modification... Some wannabes, Robert Smith
suggests, want amputation as a way to gain sympathy from others. And finally,
there are "true" apotemnophiles, whose desire for amputation is less about sex
than about identity. "My left foot was not part of me," says one amputee, who
had wished for amputation since the age of eight.
I met Price through an Internet discussion listserv called "amputee-by-choice,"
one of the larger lists. At first I had simply prowled through the archives
and listened to the ongoing conversation. I found many of the archived
messages very creepy. Here were people exchanging photographs of hands with
missing fingers; speculating about black-market amputations in Russia;
debating the merits of industrial accidents, gunshot wounds, self-inflicted
gangrene, chain-saw slips, dry ice, and cigar cutters as means of getting rid
of their limbs and digits.
The idea of having one's legs amputated might never even enter the minds of
some people until it is suggested to them. Yet once it is suggested, and not
just suggested but paired with imagery that a person's past may have primed
him or her to appreciate, that act becomes possible.