Amputation is a growing health issue with implications for the corporeal form and sense of bodily identity. Disposal of the removed limb (the amputate) has historically been suggested to impact on patient adaptation to amputation, although understandings of limb disposal are scarce within existing research. The growth of online question and answer sites has created opportunities for social actors to post and respond to a vast array of topic areas, including those that are seen as morbid or taboo.
Amputation is the removal of a limb from the body, often undertaken due to trauma to the limb or as a result of disease or illness, with amputation being in some situations a means to prevent mortality. Lower limb amputations are the most common (90% of amputations relate to lower limbs) .
Amputation can lead to grief or trauma, akin to the loss experienced through the bereavement of a spouse, which impacts various aspects of patients’ lives including their body image and sense of self.
lent intervention’ to the body given the radical alteration it engenders to the corporeal form. Although the growth of surgery has normalised the anatomical body and surgery itself is seen as a means to treat illness or disease and stall more permanent bodily disruption (such as death), amputation has long been seen as one of the ‘more invasive and gruesome operations’. Given the extent of bodily transgression that amputation can then be seen to entail, it is perhaps unsurprising that curiosity around amputation exists, specifically around the amputate (the removed limb). The amputate is often still viewed as the ‘property’ of the person from whom it has been amputated. Questions around what then happens to amputates may centre on this notion of the limb being ‘residue of that which is no longer “me” but still definitively “mine”’.