Losing two fingers in the wild - how deadly is that?

[u/Griblix]

Context: medieval-esque fantasy story, someone gets their pinky and ring fingers hacked off. They have cloth to cover up the stumps, moss that acts as an antiseptic, and a knife that could be heated up to jankily cauterize the wounds, if need be.

My full question here is: could they avoid a severe infection with those supplies? They can have lasting problems with their hand as long as they live.

[u/10Panoptica]

They can believably survive or die based on what the plot needs. Infection is very possible.

[u/BustedBayou → u/10Panoptica]

It isn't enough to lose conscience due to blood lose?

[u/shinnagare]

Don't forget that they'll be treating the wound with potentially unclean fingers of the opposite hand. That would be just as important as keeping the wound itself clean.

[u/VokN]

50/50

You either get infected or you don’t

That’s pretty much all you get to work with the rest is plot and writing, a mild fever that breaks and an infection that goes away is a common fantasy trope

[u/ToomintheEllimist → u/VokN]

Yes! OP could help improve the character's survival by having them be in a warm environment with lots of rest and food, or nerf them by having it be cold and hard to rest.

[u/blessings-of-rathma]

Have you got any handwavey magic or potions that can be used here, or is this character restricted to non-magical healing in this situation?

[u/Teagana999]

How good is the moss? How dirty was the knife that made the amputation?

As other comments said, a range of outcomes is plausible depending on details. What do you want to happen?

[u/Griblix]

I appreciate all the responses, it's all pretty much what I was hoping to get. If anything, some problems from the wound will be helpful for future story moments, but I wanted to be sure I could get away with problems and not problems.

[u/adulaire]

Hey! Incidentally, I am currently working on a big research project on traumatic wound care in early 11th century Eastern Europe. It's somewhat of a mixed bag: with the benefit of a thousand years or so of hindsight, some of the stuff they did really was helpful and worked, and some of it... less so. I'll share the practices that would be to some extent helpful so that you can have your character rely heavily on those particular practices and not the counterproductive ones. This will be biased towards Eastern Europe around the early 11th century, but here goes:

• Plants containing saponins, including, specifically, Saponaria officinalis (aka one of 20 plants called soapweed), were used as soap for cleaning (Grmek 1959: 24). When the plant is flowering, its roots contain up to 20% saponins (source: Hiltunen, Raimo; Holm, Yvonne. Farmakognosia (in Finnish). Helsinki University Press., cited on Wikipedia 10/30/2024). 
• We know that rannik (some sort of Plantago) was used for wound care because its name is derived from the word for “wound” and also Plantago does help with wound healing (Grmek 33) (Combining this with other sources led me to the conclusion that the species was most likely Plantago major. You can find tons of reputable online sources, like in peer reviewed medical journals, about how Plantago major is in fact effective in treating bleeding and burns.)
• “Bogojavlenskij has recently pointed out the efficacy of some ancient Russian methods of healing. For instance… garlic contains phytoncides which have a favourable effect on suppurated wounds.” (Grmek 35)
• In what survives in contemporary Belarus area: “The species which achieved the highest Use Value were: Calendula officinalis (5), Cyanus segetum (5), Helichrysum arenarium (5), Betula sp. (4), Prunella vulgaris (4), and Nuphar lutea or Lilium sp.” (Kujawska et al 2017: 5) Source on calendula standing up as EBM for wounds. Achillea millefolium L. used for “bleeding wounds”, Aloe spp. for wounds (Kujawska 2017: 6), Bryonia alba L. for wounds, Cynoglossum officinale L. for wounds (ibid 7), Lycopodium clavatum L. for wounds (ibid 8), Plantago major L. and other Plantago spp. for wounds (ibid 8), Tropaeolum majus L. for wounds (Kujawska 2017: 10)
• Open cut wounds treated w/ yarrow juice (Kozlowska et al 2018: 8) 
• Beeswax was available (Kozlowska et al 2018: 9) and is still used as a skin protectant (occlusive) today. However, you can't just rub straight beeswax on skin or wounds - it needs to be prepared over heat in combination with an oil. Today that's most often olive oil (which was known in this time/place but was an extreme luxury, like generally used only in royal households) and at the time it would have been butter, beef tallow, poppy oil, hemp oil, or flax oil. More importantly though, beeswax itself was a luxury item so may not have been available to your character, and depending on the context behind being "in the wild" they very likely may not have had the time/space/resources to really go all-in on preparing a salve lol.
• Wine was used to sterilize both wounds and surgical equipment, and could also be used to manage pain (all b/c of the alcohol content) Source
• They actually did have an understanding of suturing wounds by this time period (Grmek 35)
• They would have used linen for bandages. In some areas (I believe Western Europe but could be wrong as that is not my area of interest), cotton was entirely unknown; in other areas (the area I'm researching) it was known but a grand luxury.
• They did not have an understanding of germs, bacteria, or viruses, but did have an understanding that things that smelled bad tended to correlate with the development of illness, which loosely led to generally safer and cleaner practices. 

You may have more freedom to have your character be more knowledgeable/successful than I do in our respective projects, because A) there's still a solid few centuries in the medieval period after the early 11th C, a solid few centuries in which knowledge was growing and spreading rapidly, and B) it took markedly longer for Greco-Roman medical discoveries and innovations to spread to the Slavic nations than to spread to Western Europe.

If you have any follow up questions feel free to ask though obviously I may or may not have an answer! And best of luck with the writing!

[u/ChaserNeverRests → u/adulaire]

Wow, thanks for writing all that up!

If you're ever looking for a new sub, answers like this are just what /r/AskHistorians is looking for.

[u/adulaire → u/ChaserNeverRests]

That's so sweet of you to say, thank you! Unfortunately, this was very much my moment: there is nothing else in history I know a fraction as well as I know early 11th C East Slavic trauma medicine 😂

[u/Griblix → u/adulaire]

For this specific one, none of the characters around the man who lost his fingers is knowledgable about these issues to any great extent. They know that the supplies I mentioned can help keep a wound from getting nasty, but the word "antiseptic" wouldn't come up in the conversation. It'd be more, "Pack this moss onto it and it'll help keep it from rotting." ("Rot" is just how they would phrase it.)

I appreciate all the info, definitely something I can add to the knowledge bank.

[u/adulaire → u/Griblix]

So, this is folk medicine, meaning these (with the exceptions of surgical procedures, sutures, and sterilization) were practices done in the home by community members, often but not always the grandma/matriarch of the multigenerational household. You know how a mom is perfectly comfortable putting rubbing alcohol, neosporin, and a bandaid on a scraped knee? Not socially dissimilar. Not medically more complex. Translating the raw knowledge you'll get from research into the language and tone that'd be used in your chosen setting is your job as the writer.

[u/Falsus]

Yes that could be enough to avoid a bad infection. Historically it was largely up to chance for these things. Like we have done way more advanced amputations and surgeries than that for a much longer time than just medieval times.

[u/sirgog]

Infection isn't automatic following a grievous wound, and if it occurs, it is not necessarily severe. It's a high risk of infection, not a guarantee.

A mild fever for 3 days is a plausible outcome. A life-threatening infection or death are also both plausible outcomes. The moss and cloth and cauterization make the former more likely than the latter, but there's still no guarantees.

[u/ArmOfBo]

It is very likely that with enough knowledge to keep the wound clean and infection free they would recover just fine. A finger amputation was by no means a death sentence.