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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheAuldGrump" data-source="post: 1496102" data-attributes="member: 6957">Being hit with any weapon before modern medicine arrived was lethal. Swords and knives more so than guns. And you bleed out a lot faster from knife/sword wounds than from bullets.Sword wounds cut muscle tisue leading to permanent injury. (Again without modern surgery.) On the other hand sword wounds heal faster, a deep round wound is very slow to heal, so much so that early treatments involved enlarging the wound to change the shape to a lozenge, then binding and/or stitching it.And what a low speed high caliber bullet does to bone is not prretty at all. You were quite likely to lose a limb to gangrene, but less likely to die from the wound itself. Dying of shock from the agony of amputation is a very real problem as well, the only anasthesia readily available was distilled spirits. Then they'd give you something to bite on while the surgeon had at you with his saw. It was also common for orderlies - those helpful people trying to keep the vic.. err, I mean patient, still long enough for the saw to do its work - to be missing fingers from the surgeon getting them as well as the patient.Which weapon is more deadly? most likely the sword. Which is more likely to give you lasting injury? Hard to say, though I would favor the bone shattering force of the bullet.In short - fixing one weapon while leaving the rest 'broken' is a bad idea. And most casualties took place days after the battle as infection set in, though a gut wound was as good as a death sentence... Step 1 feed the injured party onions. Step 2 smell the gut wound. Step 3 if you smell onions call the priest - he's a goner. (Pteritonitus is about as nasty a way to die as any.) The Auld Grump, the History Channel has had several very good shows on the subject, but darned if I can remember their titles...</blockquote>

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