Amazing -- a book about traumatic injuries that neglects any discussion of shock. I've had to borrow my partner's anatomy & physiology text for that part. There's some good basic info here, but I'll need to look elsewhere (& you will too) for detailed information on the kinds of wounds a character might sustain in sword fights or the treatments your characters might receive before the advent of modern Western medical techniques. Better news if your story takes place in the contemporary urban industrial world, with a modern emergency room or trauma center. But when it comes down to it, for most situations, this book isn't going to replace every good writer's necessary tool: research, research, research.

Like most of the "Howdunit" series, this is a useful volume that every aspiring mystery writer should own. It's full of helpful, often detailed descriptions of various types of wounds and injuries, how they're treated, and, if they're not immediately fatal, whether they could lead to death or long-term disability. The chapter on torso injuries was especially good: it's not intuitively obvious to a non-medical person (like me) what the consequences of a particular type of wound or blow would be, and this made it much clearer. I liked the author's use of quotations from mystery and adventure writers to illustrate his points. And, although the tone is fairly dry, I found this volume easier going than others in the series, mostly because he used comparisons effectively and included easy-to-understand graphics.
Some quibbles:
1. The book is very uneven. Some chapters are detailed and comprehensive, while I found others sketchy: for example, the description of types of gunshot wounds was a good general overview, but it didn't give enough specific information to answer the question I had. A chapter-by-chapter list of references, or suggestions for further reading, would have been useful too.
2. The author occasionally veers off into "Here's a nifty idea for your mystery novel." Some of them ARE indeed nifty ideas, but I'd never use them, because I'm sure the first person to read this book already has! I think the book would have been more useful to more writers if he'd just stuck to providing the facts.

This book gives a good overview on how an author's character can be wounded, and the expected treatment (often simplified) and course of recovery.

If an author is looking for guidance on realistic hospital practice, dialog, medications, equipment, or lingo, the author better look elsewhere -- these items are either simplified or missing.

Equally missing is any mention of the role of non-MD caregivers in hospital care, in particular nurses. The reader of this book would come away with the impression that the only function of nurses in hospitals is to hand surgical instruments to the surgeon in the O.R. -- especially sad since this is supposed to be a guide to OTHER AUTHORS for them write realistic fiction. For example, when Doctor Page is discussing how suspected belly wounds are monitored during their hospital stay, he says, "The trauma surgeon will return to the bedside over and over to reevaluate the patient until he is certain no injury exists." Not hardly! In real life, it's the nurses who provide the hour-by-hour patient care and monitoring.

The prospective author who is interested in a realistic view of what goes on in an emergency room and other hospital settings would do well to read any book by Echo Heron, RN, including the factual Intensive Care, or Condition Critical, or Mercy (the latter is a medical novel).