Need Help With A Stab Wound :)

I would suggest a thin blade, but serrated, pressed into the back just beside the interior corner of the left shoulder blade. The tip should penetrate the heart and the serrations will assist in ripping a few vital blood vessels.

Works for me, every time...

Well, the fastest possible death is right at the base of the skull. If the blade slips between the skull and the top vertebra, it's like turning off a light. It's also very easy to do, and a dagger is the weapon of choice for this kind of kill. The entire body is instantly disconnected from the brain, and death is, if not instantaneous, as close as you can get o it.

If you don't necessarily want him stabbed in the back, but from behind, a thin dagger through the ear is also fast.

If you ever want a pretty slow and very painful death, you stab so the blade just nicks the heart. It can take hours to die this way, and it's a very painful death. A stab to the liver is also a slow death, though not as painful.

Sounds like Mark's got it down. I'm already cringing and my body tightened just imaging the blade slid home.

Off to Experts for a wider audience.

As MarkEsq said, a stab in the back, just inside the shoulder blade, would get the heart and death would follow swiftly thereafter. The best kind of weapon for this would be anything thin and reasonably sharp. A puggio would do the job, or something like a seax (they're perhaps a little late for your book's time period, but I believe something similar existed earlier) if you want the attacker to be Germanic or Briton (or pretending to be one).

A standard Roman military attack is a dagger thrust up under the rib cage through a kidney to the heart. Hard to see in a crowd and easy to conceal. A classic assasination/execution stroke was the same dagger, down between collar bone and shoulder, piercing vena cava and heart. Fairly quick and painless and, to the Romans, an honorable way to die.

Both are still techniques that marines and other CQB combatants are trained in.

Jeff

MarkEsq said:

I would suggest a thin blade, but serrated, pressed into the back just beside the interior corner of the left shoulder blade. The tip should penetrate the heart and the serrations will assist in ripping a few vital blood vessels.

Works for me, every time...

Click to expand...

Actually that's a difficult hit through a lot of soft tissue. You're also likely to hit the shoulder blade or get caught up on ribs. The traditional assassination strike is to go lower, below the ribs and try to hit the abdominal vena cava, aorta or renal vessels. Also the serrations will make it more difficult to thrust the blade. Serrations are for slicing, not stabbing.

My best pig sticker has a 12 inch double edged blade and is honed to a thin point

WeaselFire said:

A standard Roman military attack is a dagger thrust up under the rib cage through a kidney to the heart. Hard to see in a crowd and easy to conceal. A classic assasination/execution stroke was the same dagger, down between collar bone and shoulder, piercing vena cava and heart. Fairly quick and painless and, to the Romans, an honorable way to die.

Both are still techniques that marines and other CQB combatants are trained in.

Jeff

Click to expand...

That.
The Romans didn't know anatomy before Galen, but they figured the way to inflict mortal wounds way before that. The HBO series 'Rome' has some good illustrations of what Jeff said.

If you don't want to mess with the ribs, go just underneath and come in from the side and stab upward and across, then rotate back all the way to the spinal cord for the slicing removal. That should transect both the inferior vena cava and the abdominal aorta. You want the latter since it's the high pressure arterial conduit, and it will give a quick bleed out. The upward trajectory of the initial insertion will also allow a slice to the diaphragm, which will complicate the bleeding with breathing difficulty.

It you go beneath the floating ribs, it will require quite a long blade to get to the heart because of the severe upward angle.

Chekurtab said:

That.
The Romans didn't know anatomy before Galen, but they figured the way to inflict mortal wounds way before that. The HBO series 'Rome' has some good illustrations of what Jeff said.

Click to expand...

Don't trust HBO for historical accuracy. Long before Galen, the Romans knew quite a lot about anatomy and how to kill things. What Galen brought to the table was better ways to put the wounded back together. Without realizing why he had stumbled into the inklings of antisepsis and the effects of inflammation. He had the beginnings of Physiology.

NeuroFizz said:

If you don't want to mess with the ribs, go just underneath and come in from the side and stab upward and across, then rotate back all the way to the spinal cord for the slicing removal. That should transect both the inferior vena cava and the abdominal aorta. You want the latter since it's the high pressure arterial conduit, and it will give a quick bleed out. The upward trajectory of the initial insertion will also allow a slice to the diaphragm, which will complicate the bleeding with breathing difficulty.

It you go beneath the floating ribs, it will require quite a long blade to get to the heart because of the severe upward angle.

Click to expand...

I know that for you it was just a typo, but you should hve said spine, not spinal cord. Others on this board might not realize that the cord is protected inside the bones of the spine.

Thin blade skirting down the side of the spine would get the renal vessels. Without the ability to seal them, the victim would bleed to death in short order. People would be fairly occupied watching the guy bleed to death while the murderer got away.

For a faster kill that results in difficulty speaking, puncturing both lungs would work. Two punctured lungs makes it hard to talk.

Pretty much instantaneous kill would be a knife blade between cervical vertebrae. Kinda hard to hit though.

GeorgeK said:

Don't trust HBO for historical accuracy. Long before Galen, the Romans knew quite a lot about anatomy and how to kill things. What Galen brought to the table was better ways to put the wounded back together. Without realizing why he had stumbled into the inklings of antisepsis and the effects of inflammation. He had the beginnings of Physiology.

Click to expand...

I'm not a medical historian, but I think you're confusing Galen with Celcus. Treatment of wounds, anticeptics and inflammation were described by Celcus in "Medicina" centuries before Galen's time. Galen wrote a book on anatomy. He dissected monkeys and other animals and conducted live experiments. He connected brain to the nerves to the muscles, and heart to the vessels. He's the one to separate arteries from veins. Before Galen, it was Hippocrates' four-humor theory. Unfortunately, dissecting humans was illigal in Ancient Rome, so Galen's anatomy was part reality, part fiction.

Speaking of fiction, I've read somewhere that "Rome" series have high fidelity and historic accuracy of mandane life of Ancient Rome.