Sword Injuries : The General Principles
Japanese swordsmanship (Iai) makes almost exclusive use of kata due to the potentially dangerous nature of using swords against a training partner. As a consequence, the effectiveness and consequences of a sword-cut upon the human body is mainly derived from conjecture. As a university academic, I used to teach human anatomy and indeed forensic anatomy (albeit mainly concerning gunshot wounds and head injuries) so I think my expert evaluation might be of interest to my fellow Budoka. The following general principles should be kept in mind when trying to deduce the consequences of a sword strike.
1. When blood vessels, particularly arteries, are pulled until they snap, they tend to ‘self-seal’ which helps stem the flow of blood and prevents exsanguination. Incisions upon an artery with a blade, on the other hand, tend to bleed freely producing substantial blood loss depending upon the cut’s size.
2. Bone’s consist of a hard shell (compact bone) surrounding a honeycomb type of bone (cancelleous bone) in the load-bearing areas and cavities in the long bones which contain bone marrow which produces various blood components.
Compact bone on the outside of bone surrounding cancelleous bone and marrow-containing cavities.
Maples in early Spring, sound like a haiku anthology, but is a description of how bone splinters and cracks.
3. The consistency of bone is somewhat like brittle timber… like ‘maple branches in early spring’ as I discovered on pruning my bonsai.
4. Muscles tend to have a slight tension in the and operating against antagonistic pairs and they act somewhat like guide ropes holding up a tent squarely and firmly. If a guide rope is cut, the tent will tend to lurch in the direction of greatest tension or the direction of the prevailing a force vector produced by the other muscles and elastic components of the surrounding tissue.
Cutting a guide-rope (muscle) cause a tent to lurch to the side of intact ropes.
5. Reports from victims of stabbing and incisions often state they feel like being ‘punched very hard’ rather than what the unexperienced might think of as a stabbing/cutting wound. The shock of impact may well be account for the initial and immediate incapacitation a sword cuts produces, rendering the victim incapable of meaningful retaliatory movements.
6. Cuts to the face/head bleed profusely because of the highly vascular nature of the tissues of the face. The subsequent bleeding can appear more alarming that the actual wound might suggest!
7. The facial nerve (Cranial Nerve VII) is lies surprisingly superficially under the skin of the face. Severing in will result in loss of motor control of the muscles of facial.
Cranial nerve VII (facial nerve) is mainly a motor nerves, it's one sensor branch being the most important nerve in the body - chorda tympani - which provides taste sensation to the anterior two thirds of the tongue. It's important because f you can't taste your beer or pizza, you might as well be dead!
What is it that stops your enemy (‘teki’) in their tracks? The severity of pain is usually an indicator of the magnitude of the injury, although there are a number of notable exceptions to this rule of thumb (gentle taps to the testicles for example, produce disproportionate levels of pain and incapacitation. The sensorimotor system will ‘selectively paralyse’ an injured limb (via the proprioceptive system) to which s anyone trying to move a broken limb will testify.
Loss of large amount of circulating blood volume will produce ‘hypovolaemic shock’ and lead to a rapid loss of consciousness. It depends upon which vessels are cut and how severely on the rate of unconsciousness. But as a rough guide the rapidity of unconsciousness (and death) is likely firstly the carotid and abdominal aortic arteries, secondly the axillary arteries and thirdly, the femoral arteries.
In the next few articles I will look at the injuries of a selected ZenKenRen Iaido cuts explaining what damage is actually caused.
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