What's in a name?

[George Boyer]

Stacey and all - Cheez, talk about slangy......what about the ubiquitous
'amp'....ugh, I say.  Idiosyncratic I may be but to me this is a too brash a
smiley face to pull on the situation.....doesn't read as genuine acceptance
to me.            Look, re the stump matter, that term was definitely a
medical coinage, taken up by people central in the prosthetic business in
the early 70s.  When I was enrolled in prosthetics study at NYU then, at a
class banquet for the students, professors etc., Marie Dorsch (Dorsch Brace
& Limb in NYC) in a discussion with Sidney Fishman (head of the school) and
others, spoke of her queasiness re the stump term (herself a BK amputee).
And I (little me) piped up with a sardonic comment that, yes, the medical
world with all its elegant terminology still had no term better for what
remained alive with the patient after an amputation.  But let there be no
mistake, 'residual limb' is a medicalization, a term stating the MDs
inclusion and formal recognition of that part of the body.  And I say to
hell with it, reclaim yourselves, amputees, from the situation of
perpetually being 'cared for', of being patientized; of all the pitfalls
this is one of the worst to be avoided by amputees trying to reclaim and
reconstruct their lives and trying to establish realistic scale for what
seems at first to be an unmanageable and permanent cataclysm.  Funny thing
is that the MDs do not really want 'patientized' patients so the use of
'residual limb' is counterproductive except among the MDs themselves.
Words?  Just little puffs of air??  Puleeze!  Consult some studies of
semantics!  GB.  :-)

Stacey Asby wrote:

> Stump, nub, residual limb, Joe, Lucille, etc, etc, who cares?  This is
> what I see in all of this. Medical society has little to do with it.