I want to give a character of mine a wound infection on his leg. Something severe enough to raise the stakes, but not lethal. Something that would be interesting to write about. The setting is very much pre-modern in terms of medicine.
https://insecthive.com/maggots-in-medicine-flesh-eating-larvae-that-heal-wounds-1-17714/
Maggots can be used to clean wounds as they can discern between living and dead tissue. Pretty fucking metal.
Some tics infect people and animals with an allergy against red meat.
The dog of our friends go this…
Can’t beat the classic
Lots of worms can live in a non-life-threatening wound for long periods of time. Some can’t reproduce in a wound because they require a gastrointestinal tract.
So it could be a single, small worm that prevents the wound from healing, is only painful enough to be inconvenient, and can’t easily be removed without cutting off a large chunk of flesh.
Yeah. Worms are what I wanted to write as well…the Guinea worm (Dracunculus medinensis),sometimes also called medina worm, is one of these and was once really common. The Asclepius rod is possibly coming from it.
If your character has a backstory that brings him to southern Europe, Asia or Africa in these times it’s basically perfect.
Another disease to look up: Larva migrans cutanea
Yeah, was thinking to make up a giant-ringworm.
Rings of 5-10cm across.
Ringworm is, in fact, a fungus. Not an actual worm.
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Balefire scarring.
It’s a radiation burn but it sounds cooler.
Honestly, WoT balefire scarring would be epic as fuck. You had a foot replaced when you were young by a wizard,.and in the future the jerk gets balefire’d so hard that his entire lifespan back to when you got your foot replaced is undone.
The charactes’s foot appears as a ghostly flicking outline, like the false light if you stare at something too bright for too long. It can make a few marks, but is not solid enough to support the character.
This could just be a clever detail, or it could be a setup for an epic campaign.
It’s not really an infection, but compartment syndrome is something that can happen in legs after an injury. Basically internal swelling of the muscles which starts to damage tissue once the pressure gets too high. It causes severe pain, and in some cases can eventually require amputation if left untreated.
The treatment is… brutal. It’s called a fasciotomy and fits well with the setting of pre-modern medicine as it hasn’t really changed much since the 1800’s. Basically, a doctor makes a long, deep cut, almost down your entire leg, until your leg is basically filleted open. Sometimes, multiple of these cuts are needed all around the leg. The cuts must be kept open until pressure is relieved, which can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, at which point they are stuctured up. I would recommend avoiding pictures if you are squeamish.
Brown Recluse bite. It’s not the venom, it’s the subsequent bacterial infection, or so I’ve heard.
Jeffrey Rowland has one.
Not a real response to your question, but the first thing I thought of (it’s not an infection):
The scarring from a lightning strike can, to me at least, look hauntingly beautiful.
If you’re writing in any sort of fantastical setting you can just make up a non-life threatening infection that mimics it.
Personally I’d go with a large painful burn scar with an interesting story, or a battle wound that reopens from time to time or causes some other limitations. “It never fully healed” ala Frodo Baggins.
A person walking around in premodern times with a semi permanent but nonlethal infection would strain believability for me.
Not an infection, but this guy I know had an accident and they had to graft a muscle from on side of his arm to the other and now his hand’s all twisted.
I once had something that would erupt in pus whenever I had a small wound anywhere on my body (and delay healing significantly). It was kinda living inside of me, clawing it’s way out.
Bleh. I once had a huge infected area (don’t ever do skin picking people) on my leg. Definitely sucked, though not something worth writing a chapter or two about.
Oof, as generally right as you are, you really don’t want to pick at your skin, sometimes there actually are reasons…
Back when I was 15 and my pubic hairs were more or less fully growing in, I ended up with a couple of ingrown hairs right under the base of my family staff male member. Yeah, ouch!
After about 2 weeks, I realized those bumps weren’t gonna heal up on their own, so I nerved up and started picking with a needle. After a bit, I caught what I thought was one ingrown hair, and managed to pull it out, though it was way tougher than I expected.
What came out looked like one really thick tightly coiled hair, but after I rinsed it off then rolled it in my fingers, it split apart to reveal it was actually 5 hairs all coiled together! Just on the opposite side was another similar bump that had 2 ingrown hairs coiled together the same way.
After removing those, within like 3 days everything was almost completely healed! Yeah, the absolute last place you’d want to have to pick at your skin, but I knew I had to do something…
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Give the character a boil on their ass, and they can barely walk or sit down, until the core of the boil is removed plus some additional healing time. Pus and black blood comes out when the core is removed.
No I won’t be going into deep details, but I had boils around 2009 or so…
A cluster of human bot fly larva.
Maybe something in the teeth? That’ll make me close one eye.
wound infection on his leg
Teratoma
Teratoma
