Body Trauma: A Writer's Guide to Wounds and Injuries

Howdunit Series

by David William Page

When your fiction calls for a character to get hurt and live to tell about it, this book is the prescription.
Body Trauma explains what happens to body organs and bones maimed by accident or intent. You'll learn about agonizing injuries and the small window of opportunity for emergency treatment. Use these facts and bring a new realism to your stories and novels.
Dr. David W. Page, a surgeon and trauma expert, takes you in close to reveal the four steps in trauma care; details of skull and brain injuries; what the Glasgow Coma Scale is, and why it's important; specifics of penetrating and blunt neck injuries; the "dirty dozen" dreadful - but survivable - chest injuries; what blunt trauma, blades and bullets do to abdominal organs; effects of injuries to arms and legs, hands and feet; the facts about bites and stings; what happens in impalement injuries; the truths of abuse of elders, women and children; how organ donation works.
Here you'll find graphic explorations of serious bodily damage. You'll be able to work backward, deciding how severe a character's wounds should be and then writing the action that causes the pain. You'll put your characters in harm's way and mistreat them - believably - to within an inch of their fictional lives.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Reference, Research, How To, True Crime, Education

232 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1996

Reviews

[Josiah DeGraaf · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was very excited by the concept of this book, but disappointed by the execution. It felt more like a guide to how 21st century American hospitals work than a guide to wounds and injuries. And the applications for writers, while sometimes present, seemed few and far between. I still gleaned some helpful information from this book--especially during the final third. But as a fantasy writer, I'm on the fence on if I want to keep this as reference or not. Medical drama writers may find this helpful, but a lot of this book felt irrelevant if you're not setting your book in a hospital.

Rating: 2 Stars (Inconsistent).

[Katia M. Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was ok, but I found it outdated and American-centric (the latter is fine, but I'm not an American writer or write things set in America so a lot of the info about trauma centres and the health care system did not apply to me and I'm sure its changed in the last 23 years anyway). I was a bit perturbed by the advice about cutting into a snake bite and sucking the venom out with your mouth if need be. That is the opposite of what should be done, but again, things may have changed since 1996.

Aside from those few things, it was an interesting read with useful information. The author did try to be a little tongue in cheek in places and it didn't always come across well, but that may just be a quirk of the subject matter.

I would recommend this as a starting point for writers but would also advise writers to read more up to date material before they send their manuscript off to the editor.

[Cate · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent guide for writers on wounds and injuries, and how to write about such. Recommended for writers of all genres, but especially writers of thriller and horror.

[Whitney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Body Trauma is a good reference tool when quickly looking up possible injuries to make characters suffer. It is clearly written from the medical perspective, which if you aren't familiar with can be a little daunting. I wish the author had included responses from patients who have suffered particular injuries to let prospective writers into the injured head-space a bit more, but can see how that would be difficult. Still, first hand accounts are always helpful when trying to explain how a particular injury feels.

Not an end-all be-all guide, but it is helpful!

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly, this book is not well-written. There are typos and grammar errors. There are confusing sentences. Many misplaced modifiers. It jumps around; at one point in a section on electrical burns, there was a two-sentence paragraph on chemical burns, and then it was back to electrical burns, with no transitions either way. It's repetitive - in consecutive paragraphs, not merely from section to section, which is acceptable in a reference book. There are definitely times of technobabble.

(Also, it assumes the writer is working with modern day patients who are going to end up in modern day hospitals. This is often not what I need for my stories. But this is not an inherent problem with the book itself.)

But it attempts to fill a niche in offering medical information in ways that are helpful for writers. And I have found it useful at various times before this, I just finally picked it up to read the whole thing. Since it covers so much material, it rarely provides all the information you might need about a specific injury, but it offers lots of jumping off points for further research. And information is provided in ways that help you make decisions about what will work for your story before you jump into all that extra research.

Maybe there is or will be a better version of this out there somewhere. In the meantime, its uses mean this is something I'll keep on my shelf to have around for when I'm injuring characters.


Not for the squeamish, in case that's not obvious.
And one other complaint, which may not technically count as a spoiler, but just in case... The first appendix was titled "A Typical Trauma Case", detailing the treatment of a man (a fictional man, I assume, though it's not clarified either way?) who had a car accident and was brought to the emergency room. It annoyed me that after all the emphasis throughout the book on how the focus was on ways people could be injured and survive, this guy died. Wouldn't it have been more helpful and fitting to show a case with someone who survived?

[Shyra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite the obvious morbidity of the book, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Body Trauma. I find it extremely informative and written in a way that’s easy to understand even without any prior medical knowledge.

The book is formatted in a way that categorises the various wounds by the area of injury which is handy for the writer who requires a trauma reference without having to plough through the entire book all over again.

I appreciate the way Body Trauma covers the basics of what happens in the OR/ER and the trauma centre. It also covers the differences between a trauma surgeon and an ER doctor; as well as the different equipments that can be found in the above mentioned rooms. The author’s morbid sense of humour and unique way of writing gives Body Trauma its own personal charm.

I highly recommend this book to any writer looking to fatally (or non-fatally, whichever works best) injure their character as a reference material. It’s a great read all around and a book I would gladly read again; even if just to refresh my memory of the various documented wounds and injuries.

[Vivi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice and fairly comprehensive (if not slightly outdated) reference guide for injuries and other bodily traumas.

[F.R. Witt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent resource material for writers

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part of the Howdunit series (a collection of writer's guides giving reference on such subjects as homicide, how PIs work, con jobs, forensic medicine, and poisons), Body Trauma is all about what the name entails: non-lethal injuries and their treatments.

There's a lot of good, clear information in here. If your character is a doctor or if an injury and its treatment are central to the plot, than you can probably get something good out of this. But don't go in looking for hypotheticals, patient point-of-view, or 'beyond the moment' details (what it feels like, how it could get worse, what effect it would have on movement or abilities before it's healed, how long does it take before symptoms start showing, how long treatment can be put off, what happens when treatment isn't received in time, etc), it sticks strictly to the immediate injury and its treatment. And note that I said injury, not symptom. There's no dancing around with treating what can be seen before the actual injury is found, nor with what the recovery would be like, or what setbacks could occur during said recovery. So writers looking for information on comas are better off consulting a medical textbook or first-person accounts.

Being such a clear-cut book, there's not really much more that can be said about the contents, so I'm going to mention the one thing that stuck out like a broken thumb while I was reading.

It's paragraph after paragraph of solid medical information and sobering or gory descriptions, and the author randomly sticks in what I think are meant to be jokes. I'm not sure what they are because jokes have to have a set-up and a punchline but these things just hang there.

Scrub tech: Stands within elbow distance of the surgeon and, unlike in American football, is not permitted to wear protective equipment.
(David W. Page, MD, Body Trauma, p51)

Why did he bring up football? There's no mention of football in this or any of the chapters before it and he never mentions any other sports. And why is he comparing scrub techs to football players? Are they often tackled in the OR? Is this a hospital inside joke?

The anabolic phase: A natural buildup or anabolic replacement of lost body protein associated with major gains in strength, resumption of activities of daily living, and a return of interest in hobbies and work; even sex drive returns now (assuming it didn't re-establish itself moments after leaving the operating room).
(David W. Page, MD, Body Trauma, p58)

Now what is he talking about? Is it common for patients to get post-surgery boners? Is it a 'hello nurse' joke?

And his chapter on rape is pointedly brief and he really went out of his way to make sure we knew that men rape women and that's it. He's supposed to be discussing the medical effects of rape; his unwanted insistence in the logistics was not only offensively wrong, but as out-of-place awkward as his 'jokes'. Which, incidentally, stopped after about the first quarter of the book, which just made their presence so much more confusing.


THE VERDICT? Unless you're writing a hospital drama and you've got a medical dictionary handy, it's nigh useless. Page pays infinitely more attention to the treatment than to the possibilities of the injuries themselves and I couldn't understand any of the medical terms he was throwing around. If your character's not a doctor, you're way better off referencing a First Aid course book, and meeting with your family doctor for more in depth help. Sure, you might come off sounding like you're plotting something sinister, but any writer can tell you that that's just paying your dues. Basically, this one isn't interesting and isn't really needed for research unless you have something super specific in mind, and then you'd be better off checking with the latest Gray's Anatomy or other up-to-date medical textbook.

[M. P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

Not the invaluable go-to book I was expecting it to be for some pretty specific RPG purposes, but a good reference nonetheless. There was a definite emphasis on modern trauma care. It wasn't what I was looking for, nor was it something I had much initial interest in, however, it ended up educational and interesting in its own right. It shames me to say this, but before reading the book I had given little thought to why exactly the first patient to get immediate treatment isn't always the one with the greatest injuries. My horizons have become a little wider once more, and for that I thank Mr. Page.

Unfortunately I had to drop half a star from my rating for the very technical language the writer used at times - not all of them listed in the glossary, or even explained in the layman language the first time they were mentioned in the text. This made comprehending what I was actually reading quite a struggle every now and then.

Anyhow, I'm sure I will have my uses for this as a reference book. It didn't end my quest to find the perfect go-to book for my specific needs, but it doesn't make it a bad book at all, especially if you need information on modern American trauma care (some details do have cultural differences, even if the care given to the body is almost as precise as a mathematic equation is). I'll be keeping this one on my shelf, just in case the need arises.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful and interesting, both for writers of action, war, and crime fiction and for anyone interested in how the body works (or doesn't work when the machinery gets broken). A lot of books and movies are diminished by incompetence in this area, like that shown when a character gets knocked unconscious, and then wakes up alert and ready to spring back into action - he or she would actually have a concussion and would probably be dizzy, throwing up, and suffering from a migraine-like headache.
If you're going to write about characters being injured, you need accurate data - this book collects a lot of it in one place and comes in quite handy.

[Lindsey Duncan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid, clearly-written overview of injuries as they might be of interest to a writer, with a bias towards treatment and recovery. The humor is a bit ... well, morbid, but it works very well and makes some of the denser subjects easier to swallow. For me, though, the book felt a mile wide and an inch deep. I would have liked to see more detail in some sections rather than so many different scenarios (high altitude, diving, venom, breakdown of hospital procedure, etc).

(Of course, as a fantasy writer, I would also have loved some discussion of what happens without access to modern medicine, but that's somewhat outside the scope here.)

[T.M. Carper · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good reference for anyone dealing with the medical aspect of fiction. At times it gets too wordy and techincal for the casual observer. It would've been more helpful for me if it had been more related to this action causes this reaction instead of this (insert medical condition here) is shown by this, treated by this, etc. It also lacks some sections -- there is nothing about comas, which I'd hoped would be touched on.

[Hikaru · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fabulous resource for all sorts of different injuries, presented in a frank, concise manner. It's organised depending on what kind of trauma you want to bestow upon your poor character(s) and gives an overview of each non-lethal injury. Not for the squeamish or faint of heart as it does have descriptions of, well, bodily harm. There are even helpful diagrams to further illustrate different injuries and concepts.

[J.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't read cover to cover because it isn't really relevant to the type of writing I do, but seems to detail accurately wounds and injuries in such a way that an author can then write about them descriptively.

[Hunter Johnson]

Body Trauma by David W. Page. A writer's guidebook dealing with non-fatal (or potentially non-fatal) injuries. Writer's guides like these are also often good reader's guides -- textbooks for laymen, as it were.

[Alex Norcross · Rating 1 out of 5]

You're probably better off just consulting the first aid section of the Boy Scout Handbook. If you need specifics researching a book, consult an actual physician or a medical textbook. This book seemed far too general and theoretical to be of much use.

[James Tomasino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great reference book overall, but definitely geared toward modern trauma response. I'd have liked to see more info about how these types of injuries were handled through the ages. Still, quite useful as a writing tool.

[Femmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

An invaluable reference book for writers, who has any type of wounds or injuries in their stories. It certainly helped me when I wrote my first book.

[Molliewog · Rating 4 out of 5]

I use this book more than is probably healthy.

[Patricia Kurz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writing reference... not technical, it's "okay."

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-have for writers who plan to deal with injuries in their works. Great for role-playing game advocates as well!