Severe abdominal wound caused by sword
Setting: a medieval-ish fantasy world. Medically, around C16th or C17th Europe, but with a pretty strong "Arabic" influence.
Searched: stomach/abdominal wounds + death + viscera + sepsis + battle etc in various combinations . I read a few accounts of Civil War/Napoleonic War battles/medicine. I also went back through the "medical" tags (and utilised LJ Seek), assuming I wasn't the first person to give a character a gut wound, but found nothing to the purpose. Forgive me if I missed it back there.
I have a character who has just been sworded to the abdomen, in a long, deep wound from his side under his ribs to the middle of his abdomen at the front. He's been cared for by another character who has no medical knowledge beyond what an infantry soldier might have. Thanks to searches, I now have a sense of the extreme unlikeliness that my character would survive this wound, but not how his extremely regrettable death would progress. So what I need to know is:
Searched: stomach/abdominal wounds + death + viscera + sepsis + battle etc in various combinations . I read a few accounts of Civil War/Napoleonic War battles/medicine. I also went back through the "medical" tags (and utilised LJ Seek), assuming I wasn't the first person to give a character a gut wound, but found nothing to the purpose. Forgive me if I missed it back there.
I have a character who has just been sworded to the abdomen, in a long, deep wound from his side under his ribs to the middle of his abdomen at the front. He's been cared for by another character who has no medical knowledge beyond what an infantry soldier might have. Thanks to searches, I now have a sense of the extreme unlikeliness that my character would survive this wound, but not how his extremely regrettable death would progress. So what I need to know is:
- How much would he be bleeding? What would the other character be observing when he looked at the wound? Blood, torn flesh, pinkish-grey intestines?
- If the other character has something vaguely antiseptic, dressings and an opium tincture, and he sort of splashes the antiseptic on the dressing, pinches the wound shut and binds it (then doses the man with opium), how long is the character likely to live? I'm currently looking at his dying within about an hour, but I can go longer. If shorter, what could I change to give the other character the time he needs here?
- Was there anything the character could have done, given access to a medieval-ish herbal medicine supplies, that would have improved the man's prognosis? I'm assuming the answer here is probably not.