Word: limbed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...world's many war zones, from Afghanistan to Rwanda, may never have heard of New York or Paris, but they are likely to know of a town in northern India called Jaipur. Jaipur is famous in strife-torn areas as the birthplace of an extraordinary prosthesis, or artificial limb, known as the Jaipur foot, that has revolutionized life for millions of land-mine amputees...
When the two met, the Sawai Man Singh Hospital was turning out only five or six artificial limbs a year, mostly for people injured in road and train accidents, and a few of the wealthier patients wore American-model limbs. Both were too expensive for the common man, and neither permitted very much mobility. Besides, as Sethi explains, the old artificial limb was a cultural misfit not just for Indians but for people in most developing countries. "We sit, eat, sleep and worship on the floor--all without shoes," he says. Also, the "shoe" attached to the old limb...
Watching Sethi's patients, Chandra became convinced that he could fashion a more lifelike--and useful--artificial limb. He took his proposals to Sethi, who explained to the barely literate craftsman about pressure points and the intricate movements of bones within the foot. For two years, the two men fashioned limbs out of willow, sponges and aluminum molds, but their experiments failed. Their choices proved to be either too fragile or too unwieldy. "We made all kinds of silly mistakes," says Sethi...
...shredded within a few days. It was only after Chandra and Sethi began to construct the rubber foot around a hinged wooden ankle--wrapping it in a lighter rubber (similar to a bicycle inner tube but flesh colored) and then vulcanizing this composite--that their invention succeeded. The resulting limb takes only 45 minutes to build and fit onto the patient and is sturdy enough to last for more than five years. Sethi says of his partner, "We had a lot of opposition from formally trained doctors. In a way, someone who's not so educated is much more free...
Those who lost something precious in the blast--their loved one, their limb, their ability to see or hear, their capacity for joy--have earned this point of view. But what about the rest of us? While the horrific scale of McVeigh's crime seems to demand the ultimate penalty, there's something unsettling about the way so much of America is gearing up for a good old-fashioned grudge killing. In a TIME/CNN poll last week, 78% of respondents--82% of men and 75% of women--wanted McVeigh to receive the death penalty. (About the same percentage favored...