the void

Blue-banded Pitta (Erythropitta arquata), family Pittidae, order Passeriformes, endemic to Borneo

Fast forward to six weeks ago—I receive an email from her husband, explaining he broke the mug (lol) and asking if I’d be willing to take on a commission to replace it. He reiterates how she has arthritis but also shares she used to make pottery, herself, but can only really paint, now. I say of course! Come to find out, he wants a WHOLE SET of mugs to replace the broken one. Even better! I end up making the whole set twice (I wasn’t satisfied with the first attempt), but finally get them packed up and sent off across the country.

I just received the kindest message from the husband, saying “It is not often in today's world that someone does 100% of what they have promised,” thanking me profusely, and sharing that his wife is already happily using the new mugs.

It's called Temminck's tragopan [Edit: it's called the "horned pheasant" in the native languages of the people who live near it, in Mandrin, Vietnamese, etc.), it lives in Central Asia, and it has inflatable antennae and that bib to attract mates.

Normally it looks like this:

This is who he is trying to impress:

the celestial monarch (hypothymis coelestis) is a small passerine bird endemic to the philippines. they prefer lowland forest habitats, with logging being a primary threat to the species & their habitat. they are overall turquoise, with a white belly and a darker indigo chest and neck. females are slightly smaller than males, and have less intense coloration and shorter crests. males are known to raise their crest when agitated or excited, often seen in response to hearing other males’ calls or feeling threatened by a predator. celestial monarchs are members of the ‘monarch flycatcher’ (monarchidae) family and, like others of this family, lead a primarily insectivorous lifestyle. they are social birds often observed in mixed-species flocks including other monarch species as other similarly sized birds.

So, pretty frequently writers screw up when they write about injuries. People are clonked over the head, pass out for hours, and wake up with just a headache… Eragon breaks his wrist and it’s just fine within days… Wounds heal with nary a scar, ever…

I’m aiming to fix that.

Here are over 100 links covering just about every facet of traumatic injuries (physical, psychological, long-term), focusing mainly on burns, concussions, fractures, and lacerations. Now you can beat up your characters properly!

General resources

WebMD

Mayo Clinic first aid

Mayo Clinic diseases

First Aid

PubMed: The source for biomedical literature

Diagrams: Veins (towards heart), arteries (away from heart) bones, nervous system, brain

Burns

General overview: Includes degrees

Burn severity: Including how to estimate body area affected

Burn treatment: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degrees

Smoke inhalation

Smoke inhalation treatment

Chemical burns

Hot tar burns

Sunburns

Incisions and Lacerations

Essentials of skin laceration repair (including stitching techniques)

When to stitch (Journal article–Doctors apparently usually go by experience on this)

More about when to stitch (Simple guide for moms)

Basic wound treatment

Incision vs. laceration: Most of the time (including in medical literature) they’re used synonymously, but eh.

Types of lacerations: Page has links to some particularly graphic images–beware!

How to stop bleeding: 1, 2, 3

Puncture wounds: Including a bit about what sort of wounds are most likely to become infected

More about puncture wounds

Wound assessment: A huge amount of information, including what the color of the flesh indicates, different kinds of things that ooze from a wound, and so much more.

Home treatment of gunshot wound, also basics More about gunshot wounds, including medical procedures

Tourniquet use: Controversy around it, latest research

Location pain chart: Originally intended for tattoo pain, but pretty accurate for cuts

General note: Deeper=more serious. Elevate wounded limb so that gravity draws blood towards heart. Scalp wounds also bleed a lot but tend to be superficial. If it’s dirty, risk infection. If it hits the digestive system and you don’t die immediately, infection’ll probably kill you. Don’t forget the possibility of tetanus! If a wound is positioned such that movement would cause the wound to gape open (i.e. horizontally across the knee) it’s harder to keep it closed and may take longer for it to heal.

Broken bones

Types of fractures

Setting a broken bone when no doctor is available

Healing time of common fractures

Broken wrists

Broken ankles/feet

Fractured vertebrae: Neck (1, 2), back

Types of casts

Splints

Fracture complications

Broken noses

Broken digits: Fingers and toes

General notes: If it’s a compound fracture (bone poking through) good luck fixing it on your own. If the bone is in multiple pieces, surgery is necessary to fix it–probably can’t reduce (“set”) it from the outside. Older people heal more slowly. It’s possible for bones to “heal” crooked and cause long-term problems and joint pain. Consider damage to nearby nerves, muscle, and blood vessels.

Concussions

General overview

Types of concussions 1, 2

Concussion complications

Mild Brain Injuries: The next step up from most severe type of concussion, Grade 3

Post-concussion syndrome

Second impact syndrome: When a second blow delivered before recovering from the initial concussion has catastrophic effects. Apparently rare.

Recovering from a concussion

Symptoms: Scroll about halfway down the page for the most severe symptoms

Whiplash

General notes: If you pass out, even for a few seconds, it’s serious. If you have multiple concussions over a lifetime, they will be progressively more serious. Symptoms can linger for a long time.

Character reaction:

Shock (general)

Physical shock: 1, 2

Fight-or-flight response: 1, 2

Long-term emotional trauma: 1 (Includes symptoms), 2

First aid for emotional trauma

Treatment (drugs)

WebMD painkiller guide

Treatment (herbs)

1, 2, 3, 4

Miscellany

Snake bites: No, you don’t suck the venom out or apply tourniquettes

Frostbite

Frostbite treatment

Severe frostbite treatment

When frostbite sets in: A handy chart for how long your characters have outside at various temperatures and wind speeds before they get frostbitten

First aid myths: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Includes the ones about buttering burns and putting snow on frostbite.

Poisons: Why inducing vomiting is a bad idea

Poisonous plants

Dislocations: Symptoms 1, 2; treatment. General notes: Repeated dislocations of same joint may lead to permanent tissue damage and may cause or be symptomatic of weakened ligaments. Docs recommend against trying to reduce (put back) dislocated joint on your own, though information about how to do it is easily found online.

Muscular strains

Joint sprain

Resuscitation after near-drowning: 1, 2

Current CPR practices: We don’t do mouth-to-mouth anymore.

The DSM IV, for all your mental illness needs.

Electrical shock

Human response to electrical shock: Includes handy-dandy voltage chart

Length of contact needed at different voltages to cause injury

Evaluation protocol for electric shock injury

Neurological complications

Electrical and lightning injury

Cardiac complications

Delayed effects and a good general summary

Acquired savant syndrome: Brain injuries (including a lightning strike) triggering development of amazing artistic and other abilities

Voltage is not lone the determining factor in electrical injury. Ever gotten a static shock? Congrats you survived something like 20,000 volts of electricity jolting under your finger. The discharge was super quick and at low amperage so you felt nothing worse than annoyed.

So back to that chart, it’s in amperage. How do you determine the amperage when what you know is normally volts? Math. Current in amps is equal to electromotive force in volts divided by resistance in ohms. Which means you need to know how much resistance the human body is providing. Which is not a constant.

There are a whole bunch of variables to consider.

Is the person wet? And yes being sweaty counts. Water on the skin drastically reduces it’s resistance making it much easier for electricity to flow through the body.

Path the electricity took through the person’s body? Anything that goes across the chest is particularly bad. Electricity can cause arrhythmia in the heart and kill you that way even with very, very small amounts of current. Otherwise electricity is going to kill you by overheating your tissues and cooking you.

Length of time exposed? A short shock is less damaging than a long one. The problem is that electricity can cause your muscles to contract so if you’ve accidentally grabbed a live wire or whatever you might not be able to let go. I have seen guys deliberately fall off ladders because they couldn’t let go of a wire and it was the only way they could think of to get their body out of the circuit.

So in summary:

More voltage is more dangerous than less voltage, but it isn’t the sole determining factor.

Wet people get electric shock more readily than dry ones.

Where you get electric shock matters. Current path through the chest is particularly deadly.

Characters must make choices.

Characters should often make bad choices before they make good choices.

Character choices should drive the vast majority of the plot. Characters reacting to having random stuff thrown at them is far less interesting than characters reacting to the stuff they've thrown after it's ricocheted around and comes bouncing back toward them.

If a character refuses to make a choice, there better be consequences for that too, and you better have a damn clear way of showing those consequences to the reader and the character.

Egyptian mold for a Heron (a bird associated with the sun, the annual flooding of the Nile, and the afterlife)

2nd - 1st century BCE (Ptolemaic period)

i can't figure out what this prouvé dress image comes from--for all I know it IS some AI retouching thing--but it could 100% be uncredited work from an academic digital reconstruction project.

as a dress historian and someone who does, to certain extents, reproduce historic dress, i have NEVER seen a digital reconstruction project (as of 2026) that I think actually advances knowledge or supports public understanding. the technology simply isn't there--and it's paired with a lack of serious sewing/textiles knowledge, specifically of the historical variety, in its technicians (ex. for Clo3D).

This has become more common in recent years with digital projects meant to resuscitate unwearable historic clothing and show it in movement, etc. Common arguments in support:

We can't get that fabric anymore to make a physical reconstruction

Digital work is much faster than physical, especially mockup/pattern/fit tests

Virtual products can be disseminated to a global audience

Ex. Empress Shōken's evening ensemble;

and the Refashioning the Renaissance doublet project that the School of Historical Dress--who are excellent when it comes to physical reconstructions--advised on:

Etc.

So! You know what can also be disseminated digitally to a global audience? Photographs and videos of physical reconstructions! (Ex. the entire BBC A Stitch in Time series.)

You know what does not behave or look like actual fabric? Digital fabric! Ever.

You know something really crucial to many items of historic clothing that separates it from modern clothing? It is often meant to shape the body--meaning that 'draping' or 'fitting' it digitally to a natural-body-shaped avatar (or, as I have seen, one with a modern bra/shapewear silhouette) is pointless.

Check out the difference between the physical and digital reconstructions of the RtR project:

There are worse and more recent examples to point to as well, but I'm not feeling mean enough to drag them out right now.

In addition to physical reconstruction, you know what a really good and more reliable method of showing, say, the hidden guts of a garment is? Illustration. Really good, loving line drawings of the type that Janet Arnold and Nancy Bradfield specialized in.

Patterns of Fashion 2 (1972) / Costume in Detail (1968)

I'm not saying that physical reconstruction and traditional illustration methods are perfect. But in my relatively well-informed opinion, digital reconstruction is nowhere near the point where it is actually useful in any capacity and I would appreciate if people stopped acting like it is.

The technology and its attending parts (pre-loaded fabrics, textures, avatar bodies, etc) are designed for modern clothing, and imo they aren't even very good at representing that realistically. They absolutely cannot be ported over and used for historic clothing. This has been discussed in the field; the last conference I went to had a whole panel on the topic. But people keep trying anyway, and they continue to argue for the method's utility.

If you actually care about furthering knowledge and public understanding, put the digital tools down and funnel that money towards physical reconstruction and actual, experiential understanding of material, fit, and result. Having to rely on a worse-quality linen IRL does not actually screw up the overall effect to a serious degree, even though it might change the making experience as well as wear patterns and strength of the ensemble. Using modern linens still provides useful information to researchers ("If this fabric doesn't do the right thing, what would the historical version have needed to look/act like in order to accomplish that?") and certainly gives a better and more realistic visual experience for audiences.

NOTP: the opposite of an OTP (One True Pairing). It is a ship a fan strongly dislikes. The word is a portmanteau of ‘no’ and ‘OTP’ and thus is not a contraction of any particular phrase.

Squick: anything that is a deep-seated, visceral turn-off. Squicks may be shared by many fans or be specific to one; one person’s kink may be another person’s squick.

YKINMKATO, or kink-tomato: Your Kink Is Not My Kink, And That’s Okay: used to indicate support for fannish diversity and to distinguish between disapproval or kink shaming and simply having different taste.

DLDR: Don’t Like, Don’t Read: a phrase used to warn against complaints about an aspect of fic or meta. A “live and let live” philosophy of fandom, which places the responsability for avoiding content one doesn’t want to see on the side of the fanwork consumer, rather that on the creator’s.

SALS: Ship And Let Ship: similar to the above specifically about shipping tastes.

YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary: a phrase used to acknowledge that any given individual’s personal opinion on the topic at hand may differ due to their own tastes, standards, values, experiences, etc.

As the OP points out, all of these crucially imply no moral judgment of what they’re designing.

It is a female goldeneye duck, specifically, for the PWHL team :):)

Photos source