In regard to the staff report, “Can humans really spurt blood like in movies?” I’m going to leave a personal experience.
I once saw someone shot in the stomach twice at close range here in Los Angeles in a Japanese arcade. Five minutes after the shooting, when the EMT’s cut away his shirt there was no blood on the surface of his body or soaked into his shirt. I was standing about four feet away from the body and got an excellent view under the florescent lighting.
The bulletholes on the wounded man looked like two black/purple dots each the size of a dime, almost as if they had been burned shut. Each of the bulletholes were surrounded by a foot of deeply bruised purple skin. One of the bullets had even exited his lower back by his spine (revealed when the EMT carefully rolled him onto his side) and again there was no surface blood, only massive brusing and a deep purple hole.
I would venture to say from that experience that humans don’t spurt blood like in the movies, they just absorb the impact and the bullet hole is cauterized (unless it’s a high caliber and punches a fist sized hole through the back).
PolarField, your anecdote may be true, but it doesn’t really answer the question. You are looking at a specific case, and saying, “The blood didn’t spurt here, therefore it can’t spurt ever.” Whereas the question is addressing all cases. Under other circumstances, blood can spurt like in the movies. Sever an arm instead of take a bullet to the gut, for instance.
Perhaps movie portrayals are not fully accurate, or perhaps the shots you saw were a rare situation, but neither disproves that humans can spurt blood.
If you want to see impressive arterial spurting, look at the end of Akira Kurasawa’s Yojimobo. I think he was exaggerating for effect, reportedly because people said he never showed spurting blood in his other flicks.
CalMeacham, there’s plenty of spurting blood in Kurosawa’s movie Ran.
A friend of mine works for a large chicken company, and in their plant, as the chickens are sent down the line, their carotid arteries are severed but the heads are otherwise left intact.
According to my friend, this is so the heart keeps beating long enough to pump out most of the blood through the cut artery. If the fowl were simply decapitated, he says, they wouldn’t do that (presumably because the central nervous system would immediately stop telling the heart to beat, but I don’t know).
Keep in mind that what you saw was a shot to the abdomen where there are few major blood vessels and the intestines tend to bloat out into the wound and staunch any major hemorrhaging.
If the gunshots had impacted the victim differently, I daresay that you would have seen quite a bit more blood.
The reference to Bud Dwyer is appropriate, so if you haven’t seen the footage, get thee to a “Faces of Death” video. But I wouldn’t call it spurting. I’ve seen spurting, and that’s not spurting. But here’s what is:
As a hospital orderly I used to see all kinds of cool stuff and sometimes got to help. Several times I witnessed the placement of subclavian catheters for antibiotic therapy. If you’ve got a bad infection a lot of times they’ll put you on IV antibiotics and run the stuff into your veins. But if you’ve got a potentially fatal infection they’ll squrt it right into your heart. You know the needle that gets taped to your arm for an IV? Picture the one that is inserted between your neck and shoulder, right behind the collarbone. After it pops and cracks it’s way through various rigid structures of the thorax it (hopefully) comes to rest with the tip right up next to the heart inside this massive artery. They know it’s in place because they leave the other end of the needle open. Believe me, it spurts. I’ve seen blood hit the wall eight feet away. Granted, the combination of a relatively small guage apparatus and the high pressure in that area cause this geyser, but you get the picture. So you can bet that a trauma injury will occasionally get a little frisky and go airborne.
Cecil could probably do a little math regarding pressure in the bladder and the ability to spew urine vs. blood pressure, but I’m not going to fool with it. Ewwww…
I had a roommate in college (an engineering major) who with his other really bright friends (hi mike, cliff and john), were squirting a water and dry ice mixture from shampoo bottles made of plastic, making fake fog. Mike, wanting to join in found a small glass bottle with a screw on top. Just before havoc broke loose, mike realized his mistake and held his palm out (as in talk to the hand) toward the bottle, saving his eyesight when the bottle exploded. It tore a small artery in his hand. Blood proceeded about the room as though from a rainbird sprinkler, including walls and ceiling in the living room where it took place and in the bathroom.
I was not personally present, but walked in on the aftermath, figured out most of it (cept the dry ice part), concluded that there was not enough blood for a death and began cleaning it up, and learned the story upon the return of the boy geniuses from the infirmary.
All three of the gentlemen in question were taking difficult chemistry and physics courses at the time. I cleaned up no smoking paraphenilia, and they did not appear to have been drinking Miller Beer, their usual drug of choice.
This was 1981 and all three thought highly of Ronald Reagan.