Both Smith and Reid pointed out that these people may do themselves unintended harm or even kill themselves trying to amputate their own limbs. Yet the psychiatrists and the surgeon were all baffled by the desire for amputation. To be honest, I couldn't quite understand it. The suffix - philia is important here. It places these conditions in the group of psychosexual disorders called paraphilias, often referred to outside medicine as perversions.
Fetishes are a fairly common sort of paraphilia.
In the same way that some people are turned on by, say, shoes or animals, others are turned on by amputees. The apotemnophile's desire is to be an amputee, whereas the acrotomophile's desire is turned toward those who happen to be amputees. I found John Money's papers on amputee attraction at the University of Otago, in Dunedin, New Zealand, shortly after the Falkirk story made the news. Money is an expatriate New Zealander, and he has deposited his collected manuscripts in the Otago medical library. I had come to Dunedin to write a book at the university's Bioethics Centre, where I'd worked in the early 1990s.