11-30-2005, 10:21 PM
The lead article in the second volume of Spada (which is likely known to those interested in Western Martial Arts) is about the lethality of wounds. The authors (one in WMA, the other a trauma surgeon) looked at both the historical accounts of people wounded, as well as modern cases of people brought into an ER.
Vegetius was wrong. A two-three inch deep thrust in the body is often surviveable, and in the cases where it is ultimately fatal this may take hours or days before the victim succumbs. Any number of men fatally wounded with thrusts have managed to kill their opponents in duels. The idea of rapid, reliable kill is greatly overrated. Please get a copy of this article, it is an eye-openner.
Incidently, I have doubts about using a sword to sever the spinal cord when attacking an opponent from the front. The vertebral bodies protect the cord from that direction, and are an inch or more thick. There are cartilage discs between the bones, but these are not very thick and are oriented at varying angles along the spine - hitting a disc alone would not be an easy thing. Cutting the cord from the front with a thrust would be roughly comparable to thrusting a sword into the fresh thigh of a pig and thrusting through the femur with the tip of the sword. Not impossible, but not readily repeatable either.
Vegetius was wrong. A two-three inch deep thrust in the body is often surviveable, and in the cases where it is ultimately fatal this may take hours or days before the victim succumbs. Any number of men fatally wounded with thrusts have managed to kill their opponents in duels. The idea of rapid, reliable kill is greatly overrated. Please get a copy of this article, it is an eye-openner.
Incidently, I have doubts about using a sword to sever the spinal cord when attacking an opponent from the front. The vertebral bodies protect the cord from that direction, and are an inch or more thick. There are cartilage discs between the bones, but these are not very thick and are oriented at varying angles along the spine - hitting a disc alone would not be an easy thing. Cutting the cord from the front with a thrust would be roughly comparable to thrusting a sword into the fresh thigh of a pig and thrusting through the femur with the tip of the sword. Not impossible, but not readily repeatable either.
Felix Wang
