Peter Von Danzig
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- Jun 11, 2022
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People die from minor injuries in the modern day - but I wasn't talking about a splinter in their finger. I meant adventurer type injuries. A sword strike on an arm might heal but it also might need to lose the arm. A sword strike on the torso was either an impressive scar or a suppurating wound and eventual death. Again I go back to germ theory.
Right. And I'm telling you that this is something generally misunderstood about the period. Your typical knight, soldier, even town citizen (due to militia duty) was wounded in battle multiple times in their lives, sometimes dozens of times. Relatively few died of suppurating wounds or infections as a result, depending on the specific type and severity of injury and precisely where and when it happened. So neither do player characters necessarily.
They did not have germ theory in the middle ages, but they did have surprisingly effective medical techniques which not only kill germs, they kill super germs, and they knew how to treat mild to moderate battle wounds, again depending on the specific type and the specific time and place, with a pretty high likelihood of success. Even really brutal injuries such as an arrow stuck six inches into a man's face, a severed arm, or an evisceration could successfully be treated with the medicine of the day.
One of the reasons I really love the "Master and Commander" movie over the Hornblower series is the detail on injuries and the lack of fear regarding character death. I would have mentioned the "Dying room" episode of Sharpe but bloody Sharpe himself was effectively immortal.
But Master and Commander is set in a different era, and not necessarily a better one in terms of medicine or the types of wounds often faced in battle.