Stab Wound

There would be no walking.

He would be dead, or bleed to death quickly. Even if he did survive, he would die from peritonitis. No anti-biotics to fight the intestines contaminating the wound.

Running parallel to the spine is the descending aorta about as thick around as your thumb. If the blade hits that your char is dead in 5-10 seconds from sudden bleed out. Aneurisms form here as well, expanding the blood vessel walls to the size of a large grapefruit until they burst. Dragging a knife up would cut through the stomach, possibly the pancreas and spleen and up to the liver.

Please remember the area you are talking about is the traditional hari-kiri spot for commiting suicide.

How about a smaller blade? Nine inches is a bayonet and will cause considerable damage if jerked upward. The victim, if he could walk, would be holding in his intestines. His lower abdominal muscles would all be severed, so there's a good chance he would not even be able to get up off the ground.

The entry wound in the middle does not mean the blade was straight in. Actually, hand held weapon wounds rarely are. If the blade is angled to the patient's left, a splenic injury could easily act like this and if to the right, a liver laceration. Within a few hours he would start to have rapid breathing and a rapid heart rate, trying to compensate for the decreased blood volume and therefore decreased oxygen carrying capacity. As a retired surgeon, this scene sounds like one of the more plausible one's that I've seen and is par for the course for internal bleeding prior to the advent of abdominal trauma surgery.

tallus83 said:

Please remember the area you are talking about is the traditional hari-kiri spot for commiting suicide.

How about a smaller blade? Nine inches is a bayonet and will cause considerable damage if jerked upward. The victim, if he could walk, would be holding in his intestines. His lower abdominal muscles would all be severed, so there's a good chance he would not even be able to get up off the ground.

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Nine inches is a common length for daggers and is shorter than my pig sticker which is 12 inches. The bayonet for my zouave musket is 18 inches. Also the intestines don't "fall out" in a stab wound. They are attached to the body, not free floating. People hold wounds as a reflex since compression helps with bleeding and pain, not to keep organs from falling out. It takes considerable effort to take organs out. It's not like popping a zit. You would need a much larger or longer violation of the abdominal wall to even see the intestines. Even if by some bizarre quirck, both rectus muscles were transected, the patient would most likely be able to get up and walk, not do crunches, but walking is feasible, not unlikely.

In the original question, the blade is inserted to the hilt then jerked upward. Which sounds a lot like the blade rips the skin, etc. and is not a clean stab in and removal. I am aware that internal organs don't just fall out.

I was thinking more of a WW2 bayonet which, except for the Japanese, was shorter than a Civil War type.

Normally the "jerking upward" refers more to the tip of the knife with the skin acting much like a fulcrum, such that the entry wound still mimics a simple "poke and pull". That's what has to be determined when you clean and examine a knife wound. Two identical looking skin wounds cn have very different internal damage. The organs are much easier to injure than the skin even though we humans have among the most frail of skins comparatively speaking. A 9 inch blade in the 1200's was much heavier and far more dull than a scalpel and would require a lot of strength, time, multiple attacks or luck to produce a deep wound (violating the internal organs) that also made a large jagged cut on the outside. Blades were made to either stab or slice. For the blade to be heavy enough to not break when the motion of attack is changed in the middle it would be very difficult to make it sharp enough to produce an "L" shaped skin wound. The 6 inch WW2 bayonets were made with a very different steel and still were designed to "poke and pull".

I guess it would also depend on training. A soldier or an assassin could conceivably perform things very differently than Joe the baker and have a specialized weapon that the average Joe didn't have. I guess my main point is that it is very concevable and even likely that someone in medieval to preindustrial times can have a delayed death from a stab wound. Immediate death is not the norm, but for a good assassin it should be.