[Answered] Would you have to cut through bone to cut off a hand?

I'm not a doctor and I can't really answer you question, but when a cook cuts up a chicken or other types of meat they often cut right at the joint line.

Sinews are what actually holds most bones together, by the way.

Yeah, what alleycat said. If you know where to cut you can do it without going through bone. That's presuming you know exactly where to cut and this isn't the hand of someone who's struggling or anything. If you've worked with chicken or other poultry, you know it can be tough to find the right spot even on a dead and cooked bird if you haven't had much practice.

A straight straight line? The bones don't really go that way, see the curve?

Is this on a body? That'd be easier, but a really straight line I don't think is happening unless you just mean across the skin. I think it'd depend too on the person as to the growth plate situation at the time and how developed their musculature and such were, and if it's the dominant hand or not will make it harder or easier too, but also depends on what you're using and how much you can pull, twist, etc., the joint I'd think.

Of course, if you want someone to cut off a hand in a story, then a heavy meat cleaver or hatchet would do it, bone or not.

If you just kept pulling on the hand and cutting on whatever non-bone bit was tightest, you wouldn't need to curve your cut at all. But it probably won't look like a straight cut when you've finished, and it wouldn't be a cleaver-type single stroke.

I used to work as an Orthopaedic Specialist nurse. In structure the wrist is condyloid, which basically means the surfaces are curved. I reckon I could get a hand off in about ten seconds with a sharp, slim bladed knife. No need to damage bone.

Oz

If you wanted it to look like a straight cut it would certainly be possible. You could make a circular cut in the approximate area around the wrist, then separate the ligaments holding the joint. If the subject was already dead then it would be easy, and probably not that messy.

You could do it by cutting across from one side to the other in one go, but it wouldn't be as clean a cut.

The carpals can be pulled apart enough to cut between them. I guess my question would be what you're using to cut off the hand. If you're using a sharp, small knife, then I think it would be possible to cut it fairly straight and avoid the bones. If you using a big saw, then you'll likely cut into some bone.

It's been a while since I've cut off someone's hand and they're always such babies about it.

There's connective tissue that you can cut through, but it would be easier to slice through the bone.

The wrist has a number of small carpal bones that do not meet in a perfect line. I don't think it would be terribly easy to find a plane of section in someone's wrist that wouldn't go through at least some of those bones.

Are you doing this in a modern medical or surgical context, or are you describing something more in line with a pre-industrial medical setting or a field amputation? If the situation is the latter, I think it would be done as quickly as possible via a straight line cut.

Question: Do you understand the tools needed to cut through muscle vs bone?

If you take an axe or sword and 'slice' the mid-forearm, the radius and ulna will likely be crushed.

If you use a knife to slice the muscles around the bone (can do this quickly, but you have to shift to get all the way around easily) you can then use another tool to cut through the bone with minimal crushing, thus getting a 'straight' cut that you desire. The muscle may pull back a bit, so the bone will appear to stick out a little, depending on the corpse. You can avoid this by cutting the meat, pushing it back a little, then cutting the bone. It will look straighter.

Google youtube for cutting chicken into parts for picks of going through joints, similar to how you would cut up anything.

I've sliced up lots of dead things for food and pathology. Garden sheers are great as long as they are sharp.

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Oh, what's that? You don't actually want a visit from Homeland Security? My bad. See, I've had a rough day, what with the emergency extremism after the radical tornado that ruined my home grown worm garden. The brute force needed to aid my plot was rather like a brush fire in a hail storm.

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PS- on a more serious note, the end of the radius and ulna are relatively flat (lumpy, but flat-ish). If you hacked through the upper wrist and sliced off all the small carpal bones (those rectangle-y ones) you would have a fairly straight cut but not a perfectly straight one. But as noted with the muscles pulling back, nothing will be perfectly straight or flat when cut.