Treatment and infection of gunshot wounds (Sengoku Japan)

[oudeteron]

Hi, everyone. I need help with a scenario that's so specific I'm not having much luck googling it because of the whole historical aspect (I keep coming up with present-day resources while searching for the medical stuff, and only technical information while searching for the firearms. Search terms have included things like "16th century firearms

Comments

[oudeteron]

Okay, thanks for the suggestions. Maybe I'll just search for further similar types of injuries around that time to gauge what's still fairly probable (hoping they'll be described in enough detail). And tetanus could work, I think, so I'll research that.

[rosefox]

Does he need to die of that particular wound? He can be injured in a pretty treatable way, recover slowly... and then reopen it somehow, it gets infected, and then he dies.

[oudeteron]

Yep, the nature of the injury is one of the things that mark the situation as historically recognizable (if heavily romanticized in the sources I could find, and fictionalized still further in my version). As I said, I can make it progress a bit faster, but I can't take out the gunshot thing as such or it's not this character anymore.

But reopening/irritating the wound is an idea I'll ponder. Thanks for replying!

[duckodeath]

How about the wound itself doesn't kill him, he's recovering nicely from that, but he's lying flat to recover, gets a respiratory infection from not breathing properly and that kills him. Alternatively, if you want it to be more directly connected to the wound, he has cracked or broken rib(s) from being shot, breathing deeply and coughing hurts, doesn't do it, respiratory infection, stone dead.

Wikipedia says lead poisoning from bullets is pretty much unheard of, except if the bullet is lodged is a joint (ouch) because as they deteriorate the continue to release lead into the bloodstream.

[oudeteron]

I could work with both of your ideas, but actually the broken ribs sound good (I mean, "good"...yeah). How long would death of that most likely take? It might be a nice detail to add in any case, but it won't serve my purpose too well if it makes his chances of surviving a month after the shot even slimmer.

Thank you for the poisoning info; I'll just forget about it in that case.

[duckodeath]

Once the respiratory infection was in place, he would probably only last a few days to a week and would be very sick, very quickly, but you could delay the start of the infection by saying for the first two weeks or so he was much more comfortable sitting up and it was only when he started to feel better that lay down for too long and boom.

[oudeteron]

Super late reply, sorry. Thanks for this idea! I've...actually reconsidered this whole thing a little, and might now make the shooting significantly less serious and then have him die of "good" old pneumonia. That produces the kind of structure I need in this narrative (that is, a longer time span in the middle than I was getting with the serious gun wound options). But thanks all the same; I'm still in the process of drafting this whole thing, so who knows.

[lilacsigil]

One thing about Japanese pre-modern medicine that will make your monk look more competent is hand-washing and keeping the wound clean and covered with clean fabric that is then burnt. This was largely for spiritual/custom reasons, but it also meant that Japan had a lower childbirth and surgery mortality rate than Western countries at the time.

[oudeteron]

Hey, that's perfect. Thank you!

[marjun]

An easily accessible account of a gunshot wound that led to death later is that of James A. Garfield. The details can be found anywhere, but Ira Rutcow wrote an entire book about the assassination and medicine.

[oudeteron]

Sorry for the late reply, but thanks for pointing this out to me. I don't think it suits my purposes to infer much about the methods, needing place-specific ones for my possible scenario after all, but just reading the linked article was nice and illustrative for the likely health issues.