Often I see a bone saw displayed in museum cases and lament, much like those around me, the pain it must have caused. I titter with my friends and say a little prayer that I live in a time with anesthesia.
But why in GOD did they use the bone saw?! Why not use a guillotine of some sort?
I imagine a little cage, with a guillotine, that is put in the right spot for the amputation. Then, someone swings a maul down, plunging the guillotine down, and amputating as necessary.
Surely this has been thought of....
I'm not sure how much force a guillotine would need to amputate a femur, for example. I'd think more force than decapitation, since it's mostly soft tissue that a guillotine slices through in the neck. Guillotines are like 10 feet tall, which doesn't really make them practical, and even less so if they had to be bigger to amputate a femur.
But I think the main reason for using a bone saw rather than a guillotine, or an axe, for that matter, is precision. I've seen old guides to amputation--18th, 19th century--and at that time, with no antibiotics, you had to be sure to make a good cover over the wound so it wouldn't get infected. Typically what they did was to make an incision in the skin at an angle, according to the book I saw. This would leave a flap of skin that could be folded over and stitched in place to cover the stump. But a guillotine makes a straight incision and doesn't allow for leaving a large flap of skin. So you're really narrowing down your options. Plus, the guillotine wasn't even used before the late 18th century, so it wasn't an option before that time (there was a precursor to the guillotine that was used for some executions, but it wasn't common).
Bone saws are small. Guillotines are big, and thus not very portable. Your theoretical limb-guillotines also would have a lot of moving parts that could potentially break or need maintenance. Guillotines also trade precision for speed and force, which means that if you're doing a delicate surgery, you probably don't want a guillotine.
Along these lines, a quick bit of research online shows that there were and are different types of bone cutters for different body parts and surgical situations. It would be hard to achieve this with a guillotine, where you'd basically just have one general Limb Guillotine. Such a machine would be useless for fingers, for example, or ribs.
I also feel like a guillotine would cause an awful lot of unnecessary blood loss, though I suppose an amputation of any kind is going to do that. But perhaps by using a saw, the wound could be cauterized by a nurse or assistant as the body part is amputated, resulting in less blood loss?
I have a follow up question (I hope it's allowed), how did they stop the bleeding? Did they have chemicals? Fire?