The Cutprice Guignol

On 5th January, 2002, denizens of the internet were prepared for a show they would never forget. And the star of that show was Paul Morgan, a thirty-three-year-old American man who had suffered a serious spinal injury fifteen years earlier. Morgan had spent the better part of the last year fundraising to reach a hefty target to fund the events of his livestream – during which, according to Morgan, he would cut off his own feet with a homemade guillotine in front of hundreds of viewers. Let’s talk about the bizarre internet relic of CutOffMyFeet.com, and just how the legendary website’s mission is still grimly relevant today.

The story of CutOffMyFeet began in 1986, when Mississippian Paul Morgan (known to his friends as “Freck”, shortened from Freckle) suffered an accident that would change the course of his life. A then-eighteen-year-old Morgan spent the day of August 24th, 1986, boating with his friends – the teenagers piled into a truck to head home, their boat loaded on to a trailer hooked up to the back. However, during the journey, Morgan fell out of the back of the truck and under the trailer that was carrying the boat, leaving him with serious injuries. He spent the following three months in and out of hospital, enduring a number of spinal surgeries (including thoracic lumbar fusion with harrington rods, and weeks later, the removal of the same rods), a kidney removal, and gruelling rehabilitation. The accident, it transpired, had severed Morgan’s T12 vertebra, leading to partial paralysis in the lower half of his body – from the waist down, Morgan’s paralysis grew more severe, with Morgan eventually losing all sensation in his feet.

In the fifteen years between Morgan’s initial accident and the launch of CutOffMyFeet.com, his life changed drastically. In high school, Morgan played basketball and engaged in a variety of watersports, including kneeboarding and skiing, all of which were now unavailable to him. With the help of leg braces, he was able to regain limited mobility, but he was left with no sensation or mobility below the ankles after the accident. He received medical disability payments, but his Medicare plan (a Government program intended to offer some level of medical financial support to those in need, upon which about one in eight Americans at the time depended) did not even cover the cost of the catheter bag he needed after the removal of his kidney. Morgan had made use of a few different prosthetics over the years, but had found them limited in stability and usability. Over the course of the 1990s, a number of improvements were made in the development and design of prosthetic limbs for amputees, and, come the turn of the millennium, Morgan had decided that he wanted to replace his paralysed feet with prosthetics. He had his eye on a piston-type prosthetic which would mimic the movement and tensile strength of muscle and restore some of his ankle movement. Only one problem: his feet were, for the time being, still attached to his body. But Paul Morgan didn’t intend for them to stay that way for long.

According to CutOffMyFeet.com, Morgan’s healthcare providers were reluctant to cover the amputation and installation of prosthetic limbs because they were technically unnecessary – despite his ongoing paralysis and limited mobility, he was still functional, rendering the surgery little more than a luxury in the eyes of his insurers. He would need to raise the money for the prosthetics himself, as well as, of course, finding a way to excise his feet from his body. And, with the help of a friend, Kevin Nicholson, Morgan came up with an answer to both problems: he would sell tickets to a livestream during which viewers could watch him cut his feet off with a homemade guillotine.

At least, that’s the endeavour that CutOffMyFeet.com laid out. On the website, which opened its virtual doors in early 2001, welcomed users with a cheerful homepage featuring a cartoon gif of a man slicing his legs off with a guillotine, the wallpaper for the entire site a pattern made up of amputated cartoon feet with the bone sticking out. Morgan outlined the accident that had led to his disability, the limitations he faced via his insurance providers, and his intention to amputate his own feet on livestream to raise money for both the treatment of his amputation and the acquisition, installation, and upkeep of prosthetic limbs, including the professional installation of synthetic skin over the hydraulic mechanism of his new feet. For a one-off payment of $19.99 (which, in the absence of modern online vendors, would have to be sent via a snail-mail order form), Morgan offered a membership to “Freck’s Word”, which included access to interviews with Paul Morgan and those close with him regarding the upcoming amputation, a chatroom where they could interact with Morgan directly, and a suggestion box which offered an “opportunity to tell him what YOU would like to see during the amputation”.

The amputation itself would be performed via a guillotine constructed by Morgan and a few other members of his crew – the website shared sketches of the would-be foot-remover, featuring a large stanley blade knife, a remote release so that Morgan could control its release, and two small divots in which Morgan could place his ankles for the rather low-tech surgery. The subscription also offered access to videos covering the construction of the guillotine, which would be put together in a highly-secretive location to avoid intervention from outside forces.

Beyond the practical intentions behind Morgan’s plan, he also intended it as a criticism of the American healthcare that he felt had left him with limited choices regarding his options moving forward – on the “The Idea” page, the website shared that “Paul [wa]s using this event as a chance to speak out against the lack of care in the medical field and the insurance industry. He strongly believes that this could make great strides in the much needed insurance and medical reform in the United States. This amputation is simply Paul’s way of saying that even though corporate america [sic] has refused him, he will get his new prosthetics and improve his quality of life”. While it’s difficult to establish exactly how much it cost to undergo a lower-limb amputation in American at the time of Morgan’s plan, due to other factors such as the cost of hospitalization and other injuries related to the incident that called for amputation in the first place, the best estimates I could find put the average cost at just over $91000, with lifetime costs related to the amputation averaging at around half a million dollars. While Morgan’s stunt was undeniably shocking and potentially fatally dangerous (though, as he assured on the Q-and-A section of the website, he intended to have a doctor on-site when he performed the amputation to avoid actually bleeding to death), with the costs being what they were, it perhaps comes as little surprise that he was willing to go to such lengths to improve his quality of life. With the plan in place, the date was set for September 2001, a

While the campaign initially had a slow start, his journey towards slicing off his feet soon began to earn mainstream media attention. Morgan appeared on the Howard Stern show in July 2001 to share his story and intentions, and, from there, the story picked up steam – he made a few other appearances on radio shows over the summer of that year, and was even profiled on the BBC website, making international news for his audacious scheme. In this article, Morgan acknowledged the potential legal threat that he faced as part of his plan – “In Mississippi,” he explained. “I could be charged under the mayhem laws, which carry a maximum of seven years. But as I haven’t done anything yet, there would have to be police waiting outside the door on the day itself.” While the exact number of people who had purchased tickets to the grand de-footing is difficult to pin down, but the site was well-populated and messageboards and FAQ section regularly updated with freshly-submitted questions, so, presumably, there were at least a decent number of people interested in his endeavour.

But the date of the operation came and went – the website updated, moving the date to October 31st 2001, and then it was bumped back further to 5th January of the following year. Updates were sporadic – Morgan confirmed that he had acquired “a production crew, EMT services, lighting, camera crews, director, live band, the video and DVD production, lighting, location, production manager and, oh yes, the guillotine”, but intervention from lawyers had scared off a few potential investors and several members of the crew. But, when the revised date arrived, no update came, and Paul Morgan and the CutOffMyFeet project would go silent for good.

It’s not clear if Paul Morgan ever carried out the central tenet of CutOffMyFeet.com, but it seems, in short, unlikely. Whether he was stopped by legal intervention, financial or physical constraints, or just plain lost the nerve to go through with the risky proposition, he certainly never livestreamed the amputation as promised, if he went through with it at all. In the absence of any updates on the matter, speculation began about whether Moran had ever actually intended to go through with the operation – some wondered if it was a publicity stunt or performance art to raise awareness about the state of the American healthcare system, others suspected a scam, and still more wondered if Morgan had found some other way to acquire his prosthetics and had thought better of such a harebrained scheme. Morgan and CutOffMyFeet.com would vanish from the internet – but the legacy they left behind is one that continues even in today’s internet landscape.

At its heart, the CutOffMyFeet saga is one of the earliest online medical crowdfunding campaigns to reach such a broad audience. But, two and a half decades later, the state of American healthcare has rendered crowdfunding an essential part of providing medical care to Americans. Rob Solomon, the one-time CEO of GoFundMe, a popular crowdfunding site heavily populated with campaigns that centre on healthcare and medical costs, was named one of TIME’s most influential people in healthcare during his tenure with the platform, and with good reason. While the site’s initial goal was to less serious campaigns, such as artistic endeavours or dream vacations, the number of fundraisers filed under the “medical” category (though Solomon himself remarked that he “would love nothing more than for ‘medical’ to not be a category on GoFundMe“) had leapt by nearly 25% between 2011 and 2020. At its heart, this reliance on crowdfunding for medical care is evidence of a system that is, as far as I am concerned, broken in some fundamental way; I’m enormously grateful to have grown up in a country that has a socialized healthcare system that, for all its faults, does not not rely on crowdfunding as a primary method of accessing basic treatment. But, unfortunately, that’s the reality many Americans are facing and, judging by the rocketing numbers of healthcare-related crowdfunding campaigns across various sites, the need is only growing more intense.

With that increased need comes increased competition, and, as Morgan divined long before GoFundMe came to be, the story with details most likely to engender emotion are the ones most likely to succeed. In Morgan’s case, shock, horror, and curiosity drew his campaign attention, but for others, it can be sympathy, sadness, or outrage at the perceived injustice being dealt against the person suffering. Research group the Whole Whale cointed the term “extractive empathy” to describe this phenomenon, defined as “the strategic use of emotionally compelling personal stories to elicit strong empathetic responses from donors. This practice focuses on generating immediate financial support by prioritizing emotional impact over actual community needs.” Being able to engender an emotional reaction is a consistent motivator in encouraging people to give to fundraising campaign; this fascinating study identified that both positive and negative emotions each had efficacy in encouraging people to donate, either to tap into the “warm glow” of perceived positive change or to alleviate guilt at their inaction. Similarly, the identifiable victim effect, which calls for a specific and sympathetic face to be put to a certain cause, can offer potential supporters a sense of making a bigger difference – as this CogBlog author put it, “with an identifiable victim, the proportion of people in a group who will certainly suffer without your help is 1/1—or 100%. With a larger statistic, that group is much larger, and your help makes a much smaller dent. If you decide to donate money to ending world hunger, you’re very far from solving the problem—but if your goal is to end one child’s hunger, you can sponsor a child and you’ve solved 100% of the problem”.

And, while tapping in to these emotional reactions can be a good way to meet your fundraising target, it means that those who cannot engender the same reactions will often fall short of achieving the financial support they need for vital medical care – and those numbers are skewed against minorities who may struggle to access appropriate healthcare in the first place. Around nine out of ten campaigns do not reach their goal, with many barely managing to scrape a small percentage of their original target funds, and those failures are overrepresented in campaigns run by women and people of colour. A number of recent studies and articles on the matter of what makes for a successful medical crowdfunding campaign have turned up the same results – that many of the campaigns that succeed are those run by white men, a demographic into which Morgan himself lands. I’m not trying to argue that one group is “worthy” of donations or support over another, but there’s no denying that crowdfunding seems to reflect many of existing societal inequalities that already impact healthcare access in the USA. Lauren S Berlinger and Nora J Kenworthy put it in their paper Producing a Worthy Illness, “precarity is portrayed as the result of inadequate self-marketing, rather than the inevitable consequences of structural conditions of austerity”.

CutOffMyFeet.com, despite its eventual apparent failure, served as a touchstone for many of the issues that would continue to impact American healthcare and medical crowdfunding campaigns in future; the need for an emotive and dramatic story and an individual name and face at the front of the campaign, one that, by chance, coincided with the demographics who currently see greatest success in the matter of medical crowdfunding. And, while the website and the audacious stunt behind it might be a quarter-century old now, the system that drove Morgan to such desperate measures is still firmly in place – and has left even more people to turn to the internet for help as their need grows even more desperate.

Further reading: CutOffMyFeet.com via the Internet Archive

Other articles about the internet, technology, and culture:

The Surgeon, the Eunuch Maker, and the Curious Ethical and Legal Status of Voluntary Amputation

“In The End, I Watched Him Go”: The Criminal Case of Suicide-Baiting via Internet

Autassasinophilia, Fetish Forums, and the Early Internet: The Murder of Sharon Lopatka

The Sex Slave, the BDSM Blog, and the Murder: A Deep Dive into the Delia Day Case

The Suicide and the Chatbot: The Rise and Risks of AI-Human Relationships

(header image via Desperate Living)