Poisoned Bullets

[seb138]

Hello, everyone! First of all I'm so grateful to find this amazing, rich source of information. This is my first post here so I hope I'm doing this right

I'm writing a story, the events set in a fictional but pretty much similar to 1990s London. My character "J" is a healthy, medium built 30 years old male, J gets shot with a poisoned bullet that

Comments

[cheriola]

Actually, it's pretty easy to 'poison' a blade. Just dip it in human excrement and let it dry. In times before germ theory and after knowledge of basic wound sterilisation was lost (which for example the Roman military surgeons would do, with vinegar), the wound would fester nastily and most likely kill the victim a few days or weeks later through sepsis, even if the blood loss was negligible.
I remember reading that this sometimes was done with arrow heads, though I don't remember in which culture in particular.

Though this isn't any use with bullets. The heat created by the friction in the gun barrel sterilises the bullet. (Which is why real doctors normally wait to get the bullet out until everything else they can do for the victim has been done and they've got the victim in a sterile operating theatre. Not like on TV where characters act like the most important thing is to get the bullet out, even if they have to use completely unsterile pliers or something. Aside from the infection, that kind of emergency 'operation' would just make the victim bleed out faster, because the bullet might well be the only thing plugging up the wound.)

[jgofri]

Actually, the point that article was making was that all that medieval paranoia about poisoned weapons was caused by multiple septic wounds that people believed to be inflicted by poisonous weapons, since they had no other explanation for it.