I'm writing a very small scene for a mod, that I'd like to have some medical jargon thrown in, and instead of spewing random words around, hoping no one knows better, I decided to turn to the community

The scene is about a wounded mercenary, that was hit by an arrow in the chest. He's almost healed but there's only one alchemical ingredient missing. There's no need to go into details about the procedure, all I need is some jargon for the healer to throw around as he's monitoring the patient. Nothing more.

If you have some medical knowledge and you'd like to help, send me a PM or reply here and I'll contact you with more details!

Thanks in advance

If he's been hit in the chest by an arrow then you've got a variety of possibilities from svcking chest wounds, shattered bones, punctured lungs, bleeding, infection, fluid filling the chest cavity. I'm guessing though that if the person has survived then the alchemy is to aid the recovery or prevent/treat infection.

Lots of potential injuries, how serious is the injury?

I assume this is a medieval setting

something "doctors" in the Middle-Ages used to do is attempt to cauterize wounds by pouring hot oil on the wound. this, as you might imagine, was a horrible idea, but it was something they used to do because it was believed to be helpful.

you could say something along the lines of

"I've doused the soldier's wounds in oil, perhaps this will help cauterize the wound and reduce the risk of infection."

Interesting, I've never heard of that. I've only heard of using really hot bits of metal. What kind of oil was used?

I would throw in the term "poultice" or "salve" in reference to the alchemical medicine. Maybe say something about "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism". It really depends on the fantasy setting we are talking about. Even within our own history, medicine varied widely through time and by culture. You don't want to use jargon that doesn't necessarily fit into the culture.

Good ideas here, thanks

Some more details and context for more ideas:

The wound is an arrow tip lodged in his shoulder. The scene consists of the healer walking around, examining the patient, looking up something in a book and searching for an alchemical component in a chest. At this point, the patient is still in danger and there's an alchemical component missing, that the player will supply.

While the healer is running around, I want him talking with himself about cauterizing of the wound, blood pressure, heart rate, and other things that I don't really know about. It's that part that I'd like him to actually make sense, scientifically speaking, before I throw in the alchemy and magics into it

EDIT: Changed the story above since I was mixing it up with another one.

Is this about Theseus?

If so, then he has a perforated lung.

Maybe say 'he has an obstruction of the lung' . Or talk about bloodletting, leeches, lacerations of the lung etc.
They used words like obstruction to impress their patients who didn't know what it meant.

You mean like pediatricians? Are there advlts out there that don't know what 'obstruction' means?

It's a good thing you stepped in because this is actually for Roland and I just realized I was mixing up both story lines

So, it isn't a perforated lung anymore, just an arrow tip lodged in his shoulder.

You'd want to be thinking about extraction of the arrow tip before cauterising anything, unless there was a specific blood vessel. Shock though would be a valid concern with a traumatic injury.

I learned this from a book I'm reading called Gunpowder by Jack Kelly.

it does not say what kind of oil was used, but physicians having to care for the wounded would pour boiling oil to cauterize the wound.
it was not until 1536 during a major battle that Europeans realized how ineffective boiling oil was on wounds. The person who realized this was named Ambroise Pare (there's an accent mark above the e) he had run out of oil and, to his surprise, found that his patients who didn't get the oil treatment were recovering better. So he stopped using oil and tried his best to keep his colleagues from using it too. The book claims that the boiling oil practice soon fell out of use.

I should mention though that this idea is directly linked to Gunpowder. It was assumed that gunpowder and bullets ejected a severe poison into whoever was shot. The Oil was believed to kill the poison, it was during the early gunpowder era that oil usage was most widely used.