wounds

The wounded man (Hans von Gersdorff)

Source: Wikipedia

Read a Wellcome Library blog post about the history of the 'wound man' in medical texts here.

Any doctor may be asked to examine a person who has been wounded, particularly in the Emergency Unit/ Trauma Unit setting.

In addition, forensic physicians and pathologists are frequently required to examine wounds in both the living and the dead.

The identification and description of wounds may have serious medico-legal implications at a later stage - often after some considerable time has passed since the wounding.

It is therefore essential that different types of wounds can be correctly identified and described, with a full description being made in notes taken at the time of, or shortly after the examination ('contemporaneous notes').

Studies have shown that doctors incorrectly identify common wounds and injuries (Jones 2003; Reijnders et al 2005; Bajanowski et al 2001), and even where they do correctly identify a wound type, they ascribe an incorrect 'mechanism' to that wound (i.e. incorrect differentiation between blunt force and sharp force injury).

In general terms (lay and medical, but not legal), 'wound' and 'injury' are used interchangeably, and are used to describe tissue damage caused by;