I'm toying with a fanfiction again... vaguely-medieval world with a lot of magic, and some sort of obvious wound which slowly kills a person. I'm playing with how amputation hasn't been thought of. She's under the care of a midwife with equivalent skill to a military field surgeon. Even with potent alchemists existing, they don't have penicillin. Does anyone know a resource where I can find descriptions of untreated infections? I'm looking for a slow "we can't cure her" death.
Have you tried to search for the information? Seems to be a common topic with a lot of info out there easily found. Google images: untreated infections, for example is one place to start.
Google images... even with safe search off, I think my personal filters are kicking in. It still leaves more chaff than I've already waded through. I am glad that my gum-pustules never got that severe. For infection: I've got rotten smell, fever, maybe pus, red lines under the skin.... Not too obvious to someone who has nothing but the internet for entertainment, which this character isn't.
Do you mean that no one's ever thought of amputation for anything, or that they haven't thought of it as a way to keep this special wound from killing the person? Because medical amputation has been around for a good long while.
The full story... is complicated. The simplified version is that I want a fatal wound that kills slowly and is really hard to treat in the setting, and it is obvious that it is the wound that kills her, and it's not through incompetence of her caregivers. The one who wounds her wears a wrist-blade that has traces of vampire blood... As in he's been killing vampires and not washing it in alcohol. And vampire blood is just slightly less friendly to bacteria than mammal blood. (As far as real-world infections go, it's probably tetanus rather than HIV.) Or he manages to twist her arm so bad that the bone breaks the skin and gets infected.
The setting is pre-gunpowder. I know that magic screws up the rules, but this is about half a century before the canon sees bazookas powered by black powder. If amputation was around in the days when war stopped because of winter, I will re-examine the entire arc that it might interfere with.
Some Googling (I searched history of medicine amputation) told me that the ancient Greeks/Romans practiced amputation. They knew to tie off blood vessels, and apparently that knowledge was lost in the middle ages so that amputation then was mostly about removing already-dead tissue. (Urgh.) But it's been around a long, long time.
I'm not seeing the knowledge deficit writing this story. I think you can write it as you see it and it will be credible.
Just google 'sepsis' and 'gangrene' and use your imagination for the rest. Other than this, amputations were carried out as early as ancient Egypt. The Egyptians had highly developed medicine, with surgery textbooks that resemble textbooks we use today, and loads of pharmacopoeia, including wound dressings with antibacterial properties. But they didn't have antibiotics so death from infection was common. There was an excellent documentary on Discovery Channel about Imhotep and medicine around that time.
I finally figured it out, thanks for talking me around my pitiful google-fu. I'm going with how she doesn't get medical treatment right away so they can slow down the infection but it's already in her blood. Amputation without a sterile environment has such a low survival rate that it's usually not considered a kindness in that setting.
