Body Trauma: A Writer's Guide to Wounds and Injuries (Howdunit Series)

Rating:
Summary: Everything you always wanted to know about Body Trauma
Review: "Body Trauma" tries to explain what happens to body organs and bones when people get wounded or injured. Dr. David W. Page, a surgeon with extensive experience in treating body trauma, divides this volume into three parts. Part I provides An Overview on Trauma that covers the type of care trauma victims receive in the field, at the Trauma Center or in the Operating Room. Part II looks at Specific Traumatic Injuries by Organ System, starting with head trauma, then neck and spinal cord injuries, chest trauma, abdominal trauma, and finally extremity trauma to the arms and legs. Part III focuses on Unique Traumatic Injuries, specifically bites, impalement injuries and mutilations, traumatic amputations and replantation, burns and frostbite, diving accidents and altitude illness, physical abuse, sexual assault, and organ donation. The goal here is for you to be able to work backwards, by deciding how severe a character's wounds should be and then writing the actions that will result in those wounds. Specific examples are used from various stories, usually to illustrate how the knowledge your acquire from this book can be used without going into such detail that it gets in the way of the story you are trying to tell. Like other volumes in The Whodunit Series, "Body Trauma: A Writer's Guide to Wounds and Injuries" is a valuable asset for any writer who has characters who get hurt. Certainly there are books out there with more details on specific wounds and injuries, but those are pretty much going to be medical textbooks. This book more than adequately covers the basics, allowing you to distinguish between minor and major injuries to the arm, dog bites versus human bites, and the "dirty dozen" horrible but survivable chest injuries.

Rating:
Summary: Unshocking!
Review: Amazing -- a book about traumatic injuries that neglects any discussion of shock. I've had to borrow my partner's anatomy & physiology text for that part. There's some good basic info here, but I'll need to look elsewhere (& you will too) for detailed information on the kinds of wounds a character might sustain in sword fights or the treatments your characters might receive before the advent of modern Western medical techniques. Better news if your story takes place in the contemporary urban industrial world, with a modern emergency room or trauma center. But when it comes down to it, for most situations, this book isn't going to replace every good writer's necessary tool: research, research, research.

Rating:
Summary: Wanted more crunchy bits
Review: There is a lot of good information in this book, but there were several lacks that made it less useful than I would have liked. Number one, it's not that useful if you're writing period fiction. I understand if this was beyond the scope of the author's undertaking, but some historical information would've helped me a lot.

Worse yet, especially as the book goes on, sometimes it begins to seem conventional, or to describe common scenarios, where fiction is concerned with the uncommon. For example, at one point it says "It takes an impressive hit to break the flat part of the shoulder blade." Like what? A blow with a club from a particularly strong person? A gunshot? I don't know. Worse yet, I was considering a scenario in which a character suffered a hip fracture in a fall. If the book had a section about falls (it doesn't), my questions would probably be answered, but as it is, information on hip fractures is really only given for fractures in the elderly---the common scenario. Plus, most of the information on battery/domestic violence is probably already known to anyone who has taken an introductory psychology course in college.

Especially in the last chapters (domestic violence, torture, etc)., the book is pretty thick with "flavor text" that doesn't do a whole lot to impart the technical information I bought the book for. I would prefer the author had zapped all the Hemingway quotes if it would have let me have a section on falls and other massive impacts, or even just known what, if anything, could break the shoulder blade or hip of a young, healthy person.

This book has helped me at times. The chapters on head, chest, and abdominal injuries, and the one on temperature injuries are particularly good. I only wish it had been more dense with information and considered more of the unusual viewpoints common in fiction.