Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Age of Sail Gunnery - The Lethality of Splinters (ft.Vasa)" video.

Lots of people will die and get wounded during a battle. Hundreds of people on a small ship will quickly make it all covered with blood and dead bodies. Soon there is no place to put your feet. So normally would you throw enemies and former friends into the ocean after they died. And the floor would be so much covered in blood that it would become slippery and you will easily fall to the ground in this disgusting mess. So sanding the floor made sense in order to avoid this from happening. It would make the floor less slippery, just like when you throw sand upon the ice during the winter so don't fall down. In battle it would also be important to cover areas of the ship with water and skin to prevent deadly fires from breaking out and destroying the ship.
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Wasa took the lives of 10.000 oak trees to built. And remember, that was in the early 1600s. The next time Sweden would build the worlds largest warship was only a few decades later, and that ship was twice as large. And then you of course got the royal navy with more ships than any other navy with its many hundreds of warships..
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Either the splinters managed to cut a blood vessel and made the person did bleed to death. Or it could hit an inner organ and cause severe damages so the person died - it could perhaps penetrate someones gut so all bacteria leaks out into the body and kills the man. Or it could cause a sepsis and kill the person. Even a minor injury could get filled with microorganisms. And the wound was treated early with modern methods it would not be any deadly. But since they did not have any oxygen gas, antibiotics, or intravenous fluids, and anti-inflammatory medicine to give back then could even a minor problem cause death. The infection itself might not be the main problem, but rather would it be ones own immune system that overreacts and starts attacking not only the foreign microorganisms, but also ones own body and cause one-self to die.
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For Swedens part there is plenty of wood for ship building. With the loss of its oak producing provinces in northern Germany and the Baltics was Sweden forced to rely on its own oak tree production in south eastern Sweden where oak trees have been very common historically. So in the 1800s was a huge oak tree plantation project started and gigantic oak tree forrests was created. But as everything in the 1800s was a failure for Sweden was this costly project also a failure. When the trees finally began to mature had wooden ships started to become outdated and being replaced by iron warships. It would however be a shame to cut down those beautiful trees to make ships. They are so rare and majestatic so I wish more of them are grown. And then we can build a few ships.
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@tomservo5347 Most surgeons were ignorant about what worked and what didn't so they reused tools from patient to patient. And they loved wearing old dirty clothes stained with blood because it made them look like a professional doctor that had done much surgery before. Had I walked into a time machine I would have done like the arabs and sterilized my instruments by heating them over a fire before a surgery. And I would stop a bleeding by doing like the arabs and use fire to close the blood vessels and stop the bleeding. It is of course easy for me to in hindsight declare every doctor living before 1880 a dumb idiot. And there is much truth to that. Just as it is true that most World war I Generals were bloody fools. But on the other hand was there no germ theory back then and surgery was much more a low status occupation than being a doctor that only involved himself in matters of medicine. And just like religion could not be questioned, was Galenos teachings seen as sacred and could not be questioned - even after one autopsy after another had proven his ancient Greek knowledge to have been wrong and outdated. Galenos himself had never cut up a human open, so he himself just assumed that the human body looked the same inside as that of a dog. So doctors were just taught Galenos nonsense in medical schools, so the idiotic idea of blood letting remained popular up to the 1880s. And doctors killed more people than they saved up until the 1800s. Surgery was however a difficult matter as no effective painkillers existed, and no antibiotics, and not much else either. So not eveyrthing can be blamed on the doctors.
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Warships were usually built with strong oak tree. While merchant ships were often built with cheap junk wood like spruce to lower production costs. But that crappy wood made the ship less sea worthy and more fragile in battle.
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I don't think the skin is much of a source of infection (unless you got Aids or undergo chemotheraphy to treat a cancer and therefore have an extremely weak immune system). I think wood and clothes would be worse sources of infection - especially if you got such things pushed into your chest or stomach. Either you die from a bleeding or either you die from a sepsis resulting from the infection. In land warfare did cannon shots fly into a line of men and usually instantly kill a few men that the cannon ball flew into. And those men standing near those poor bastards would likely be injured from all skeleton bones, muskets, swords and other things flying around in the air from cannon ball victim. So you will have a few who die instantly, and you will have a bunch of wounded people. And you might have 20 persons who are deeply chocked after what they have just witness and totally paralyzed as a friend just died and now his remains cover their uniforms... all hit blood and brain substance and whatever is now on their uniforms. And this is just the effect of one cannon ball. Imagine then the effect canister shot fired at close range... one such shoot would be enough to delete an entire infantry company out of existence. Most people on a battlefield of the early 1700s would probably die from musket fire however, since one side would probably start fleeing as the swords and pikes were drawn up for a melee fight. Once again does the location of the wound matter much for the chances of survival. Just as it do today. And small bullet flying at low speed like a bullet from a pistol or a submachine gun will do less damage than shot coming from a more powerful weapon like a hunting rifle or an assault gun. When you get hit by large bullet flying at high speed you will get a bigger hole into your body, and the shot will penetrate deeper into the body and often come out on the other side. Sometimes will the bullet travel a long way through the body at a strange angle and drill through multiple organs and thereby cause large damage. The bullet can also hit a skeleton bone and make it fly around inside the body and make almost as much damage as the hard bullet that is flying around. And while I can admire many ancient doctors, I would still say that it is strange how primitive and worthless medical care was up until the 19th century. And this despite people around the world already in the 1600s knew one thing or two that could have allowed them to - atleast in theory make a sterile operation to remove objects from wounds. But strangely they never used any such methods. Arabs knew how to make knives and other tools sterile before an operation to not cause infection, and they did so by leaving them over a fire and let all bacteria on the knife burn away. The Romans used honey for desinfect wounds since honey got anti-bacterial properties and is still used in treatment of certain types of wounds to this day. The Greeks used wine containing alcohol to clean the skin around a wound to lower the risk of infection by letting alcohol kill bacteria. No painkillers did exist back then so they had to rely on alcohol and opiods to reduce the pain of cutting in someones body. Another way to reduce pain was to work extremely fast and a skilled surgeon could finish an operation in perhaps only 20-30 seconds... but of course, when you got a patient who wildly bends around in pain its very difficult to operate, and when you work fast its a high risk that you make dangerous mistakes. So if someone was taking a serious damage into the middle of the body I do not think the surgeons would be able to do much in most cases. Most doctors did, as I understands it, not use any of the methods I suggest pre-modern doctor could have used to minimize the risk of infection. Germ theory was unknown, and bloodletting was still believed to be a miracle cure to all kinds of problems.
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@erictaylor5462 The only put Chlorhexidine on your skind before they put a needle in your arm to minimize the risk of infection. There are no scientific evidence that proves that this have any effect says my nursing textbook. So why then do this procedure? - I would guess its because its just an extra safety measure. If you are a patient without a strong immune system because you got AIDS, cancer or eating medicine that keeps your immune system weak (after an organ transplantation for exampel) then it could be a good idea to not put unnecessary armounts of bacteria into your body. This disinfectant does however not give any 100% protection. You will probably still push some bacteria on your skin into your own body as the nurse press the needle into your arm.
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And the risk of infection is also different depending on what part of the body we are dealing with. If you cut your finger on a paper and start bleeding its not likely that it will end up as something serious. But if you are doing a surgery on a non-periferal part of the body then an infection could often become fatal. So safety procedures are enormous. People are washing their hands multiple times, wear special suits over their normal uniforms. Patients have taken a shower before surgery. And in the operating room they get their skin disinfected with Chlorhexidine. And then all tools used are sterile. Gloves and aprons are sterile, and if you put down your hands even once you need to step aside as merely the bare suspicion than you have become unsterile is enough for you to be as sterile. Even if there is only a 0.5% chance your gloves actully touched something you are still not allowed to partake in the operation anymore. And you could be forced to stand there for hours as people are not allowed to go in or out of the room because of the risk that bacteria could wander around in the room if people walk in and out. So yes, not all types of surgery is the same.
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Land warfare in the 1700s was not pretty. A cannon ball would be flying towards you in about 350 meters per second that would be slow enough for you to see this ball coming towards you, but also too fast for you to have the chance to jump to the side and avoid it. And when the ball did fly into your line of men, then the effect would be devestating. It would plow a hole into your ranks of three men, and those hit by the ball would likely die instantly on the spot. A Swedish soldier hit by a Russian cannon ball at Poltava was cut in half as his bones and the entire lower part of the body instantly got detached from his body he made soft sound and died nearly instantly on the spot. And all his comrades around him got their uniforms stained red with their former friends blood and what remained of his body. Teeths, skeleton bones, swords, and iron and wood parts from the muskets would also fly around as a soldier got hit and killed, and those hard sharp objects could be very deadly as they did fly around in high speed and hit the poor guys who stood near they man who got hit by the cannon ball. The energy and power of the cannon ball was immense. Would the man stand in ranks 20 men deep, then the losses could be gigantic from cannon fire as the men would fall like dominos and men around them would get either injured or severly psychologically wrecked from seeing their friends dying such a brutal death. 18th century warfare was like on movies with colorful pretty uniforms, nice flags, orderly line formations and military music with trumpet fanfares, taiko drums from horesemen, or fifes and drums of the infantry. But what you don't see on movies are the backside of the coin - afraid people who poop their pants, people who get blown up by artillery so there is nothing left of their bodies and brain substance flying around and splatter cover the flags of the company. Cannon balls could be devestating. If you managed to somehow was able to get the chance to fire on the enemy from the sides then the effect could enormous - a single cannon ball could then (theoretically) kill an entire line of 150 men of company with a lucky shot that would make all those men fall like dominos to the enormous power and energy from the cannon ball. And not only could cannons fire from far away and reload at a faster rate than muskets. At closer ranges could cannons also switch over to another type of ammunition - shrapnel - and the effect of that fire was even more horrible. Entire Swedish companies of hundreds of men was wiped out by a single one of those shots at the battle of Poltava in 1709. So all those tiny pieces of metal perfectly illustrates the power of splinters as a single shot from a Russian cannon wiped out the entire Kalmar infantry batallion. And I think I have made clear the powerful effects of normal cannon balls as well. So their effects on wood and turning it into deadly splinters and blocks of wood doesn't surprise me at all.
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