War stories

the curious story of Stonewall Jackson's arm.
(Headsup TeaAtTrianon) 

not to be confused with the strange story of Benedict Arnold's leg, which even has it's own memorial, or

the leg of General Stickles, which is kept in the Army Medical Museum (AKA National Museum of Health and Medicine).

Re: leg wounds. The Tibia is right below the flesh, so a wound here that breaks the tibia will often leave the bone exposed to air and dirt, resulting in an infected bone that not only won't heal but that was usually fatal before antibiotics, so the only treatment was amputation to save the person's life. LINK

This was especially important if the leg was shattered by a musket/cannonball, since the fracture would not be a "clean break" but a shattered bone, probably complicated with clothing, dirt, and debris.
.

this article mentions that in 1676, Admiral DeRuyter died aftere his open wound was treated with whiskey and rest instead of amputation, but does comment

Actually, however, amputation would probably have increased his chances of survival only to a limited extent.

---------------------------------
One early question in medical ethics was if it was ethical NOT to amputate, and one priest discussing the Catholic tradition that one could refuse "extraordinary treatment" brought up the discussion if a person whose work relied on being able to walk could refuse amputation (and one saint argued yes he could, since he was not choosing death but not wanting amputation, even though the risk of life without surgery was small, it was not zero)

---------------------------

StrategyPage discusses that nowadays the "golden hour" (the idea that if you get a person to a hospital in one hour alive he will probably live) is now being replaced with the idea of "the platinum ten minutes".

The difference is new techniques to stop bleeding, and the presence of better trained medics (often in Iraq, the National Guard sent teams that were well experienced in civilian trauma and it was recognized that with telemedicine they could do a lot of advanced techniques to save lives). The Army is now doing advanced medic training.

Factoid from the Strategypage article:
the helicopter's  first combat mission, in 1944 Burma, was to recover injured troops