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I have a species that is born with small wings, that grow to be able to carry them by the magic of handwavium, but they are human in all other respects. It’s the Middle Ages, and the inquisition has started. The church is hunting down my species for impersonating angels. The adults whose wings can carry them are fine, but many parents are opting to remove their children’s wings whilst they are young, as the church is okay with those who renounce the so called heresy. The church is also performing the amputations on any of the angel creatures they find.

How might I limit the deaths and trauma from this procedure?

No idea about how to avoid trauma, but in the Middle Ages there was castration and punitive amputation of hands, none of those must have been pleasant.

Amputation was done with a tourniquet (a double one if the doctor was good), a swift cut with a saw and then they started with vascular ligatures (tying off blood vessels), covering the stump with a flap of skin. Then, they bandaged the area with linen covered in vinegar to avoid infections. In the worst cases, they used cauterization (closing the blood vessels by burning them), but they knew it was dangerous for the recuperation of the patient.

Circumcision has been done for centuries, which could be an analog for wings removal. But there are some differences on the procedure to note. While in circumcision you basically cut skin, in wings you have bones.

While some deaths are inevitable, the proper technique should avoid some of them.

• Clean the area with clean water and some fortified wine. The more alcohol the better.


• Use clean and sharp knife, make it red hot moments before the procedure.


• DON'T, IN ANY CIRCUMSTANCE, CUT THE BONE. Osteomielites is a dangerous and deadly infection.


• Cut the joint near the body and close the wound with stitches. Boiled stitches.


• Every day change the dressings, you can clean it with fortified wine and antiseptic herbs to your liking.

If you get an abscess, open the stitches and drain. Also, start praying, a lot.

Amputations are never safe, even with modern medicine. In the middle ages they were often the difference between a fast and painful death from an injury and a slow and painful death from infection, with few survivors.

The safest amputation, in any era, is no amputation at all!

And the reasoning is simple: assuming by "church" you mean the Church (i.e., the Catholic Church), I find it next to utterly unbelievable that they would so bother with a subset of the population as to necessitate parents torturing and disfiguring their children for the sake of their safety.

There are many issues I see with the premise:

• First, it's not a "heresy" to be born with wings. Heresy means a willful choice to believe other than what is accepted as Truth. If you grow up Catholic and learn the basics of catechism and so forth and then decide at some point that you don't like Jesus being God and invent a new religion where Jesus isn't God, that's heresy. And at the time, that could certainly land you in trouble!


• I really can't imagine any parent would let their child go through that torture! (My own world has winged folk, too -- they would be utterly repulsed by the very notion!). I think most parents would rather hide their children away, send them away to a safe country or leave and go to a different country or region first rather than cut their limbs off.


• If this is supposed to be the Church (i.e., Catholicism) then I hardly find it convincing or credible that they'd run around trying to round up "counterfeit angels". I also hardly find it convincing that the Inquisition (which of the three varieties?) would
  be so interested in killing these winged people! This smacks more of Dan Brown sensationalism than anything rooted in history.


• The Inquisitions (there were three over the course of a long millennium) were certainly an embarrassment to the Church, but it was hardly the bloodfest it's made out to be in the popular culture. Their targets were individuals accused of various theological & moral crimes (heresy being the principle one).

Basically: there's really no need to worry about wing amputations (disarticulations, actually), because the notion is really quite silly in historical context.

In any event, even if I could suspend disbelief without (intellectually) hurling, all these people really have to do is pick up their kids and fly away from their tormentors!