Homer voice: mmmmm Flay Mignon! /Homer
[hijack]When I played Final Fantasy 9, you could rename your characters. One was called <blank> Yan, the blank part being the part you named. So you could call him Killer Yan, or whatever.
I called him Flaming Yan and giggle about it to this day. Don’t get it? Say Flaming Yan aloud.[/hijack]
I’m here to tell you, when you work on a dead body with a sharp knife, you cannot distinguish the layers of the skin. You can’t peel the dermis off the epidermis; you can’t do anything except divide the subcutaneous fat. Sometimes you hit muscle by mistake.
Granted, dead people don’t bleed, but that just means flaying a live person is bloodier. And bloodier means harder to see your work. Slipperier, too.
So you aren’t going to be able to distinguish between a second and third degree flaying the way you can in a second and third degree burn. Difference between the two being, in third, everything is burned away down to the fat; there’s nothing from which skin can regenerate. In second-degree burns, the surface skin is all burned away, but the little dips of skin that follow the roots of hairs into the deep tissue are still intact; they can regenerate skin, if the person is kept from dying of infection or dehydration or the sequelae of pain. Most large second-degree burns are grafted because it takes too frigging long to regenerate the skin. I’ve seen small second-degree burns growing back in, when I was training as a surgery resident. Little evenly spaced dots of pink on the red background. They grow back at a millimeter a day. That’s slow.
And of course there’s scarring.
Another difference between third and second degree: Third degree burns are painless. That’s because the nerves are gone. I was once led to see a patient with a third-degree burn of his back. The doc who was teaching me knocked on the black leathery spot with his knuckles. “Feel anything?” “No.” Second-degree burns, on the other hand, are described as exquisitely painful. Large second-degree burns can cause waves of pain to run through the person if the nurse lifts the sheet and mere air currents cross over them. Pain itself can kill people by wearing out their hearts.
Now the applicability of burns to flaying is in the famous burn charts for percent of the total body surface area burned. There’s a rough formula: Chance of dying equals age plus total percent burned. Anyone can survive a one percent burn. An eighty year old will probably die from a twenty percent total body surface area burn. A fifty year old will die from a fifty percent body surface area burn. A thirty year old will die from a seventy percent burn. Only an infant under one can survive a 99% body surface area burn, and even then, the baby’ll probably die.
So the chance of death in complete flaying is 0%.
Hope this helps.
Gabriela
According to Catholic tradition, St. Bartholomew was flayed alive. He didn’t survive, however. In some medieval paintings he is portrayed as carrying his skin in his arms.
I meant, “100% minus (age plus total percent body burned)”.
Drat.
I thought we were discussing a total removal of skin. If you wanted to remove everything but the bottom layer, couldn’t you use the skin harvester used for getting grafts?
Heck, I dunno, Doc; I have no access to the skin harvester. Haven’t been in the same room with one since my surgery residency, (mmphm) years ago. I use a sharp scalpel. What do you use?
Wouldja believe, my razor-sharp wit?
I’m jealous.
PETA are known for posting some pretty horrific videos of animal abuse on their website. I saw one a few months back which depicted an animal being skinned alive. I don’t recall what kind it was—maybe a rabbit or a raccoon. At any rate, I assure you it was quite alive and writhing in pain after its skin was removed. How long a creature in such a state could survive is another question. Maybe if you put it in a warm, sterile, saline solution for the rest of its life it would be OK.
Michaelangelo includes an image of St. Bartholomew in *The Last Judgement * in the Sistine Chapel. The saint is holding the flaying knife in one hand, and a human skin in the other. The real kicker is that the warped and distorted face is said to be the painter’s self-portrait.
[Bart voice] I’m Esteban Yan of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays! [/Bv]
[Milhouse voice]And I’m Tomokazu Ohka of the Montreal Expos! [/Mv]
C’mon, Itchy skins Scratchy alive all the time, among other things, but Scratchy is always intact for the next episode. Of course it’s possible, right?
Warning: flayed penis may not be safe for work.
–gigi, whose brother calls her “Skexis” to this day.
I always wondered this too. Flayed where you can see the actual muscles in the face. Creepy.
In the Gene Wolfe book Shadow of the Torturer, one of the torturers flays a woman’s foot. Just her foot, as punishment for something. I wondered how she’d live through that and what would happen to her foot, Would the skin ever grow back? Was this just a slow, nasty way to kill her? It didn’t seem like she was intended to die, just to be tortured. They were treating her foot medically as if she would recover, somehow. I’ve always wondered about that.
I don’t think that’s quite right… If that were the formula, then a 51-year-old who burned the tip of her left little finger would be more likely than not to die from it.
I seem to recall (in “Silence of the Lambs” I think) a discussion of recreational flaying. Part of the idea is to hang the flayee (a much better word than victim) upsidedown, so that blood pressure to the brain is maintained for longer and the victim will remain conscious further through the procedure.
Google “The Flaying of Marsyas” by Titian - great detail, and illustrates the concept, which seems to be understood by the artist. I can only speculate that flaying as a punishment was more common in the past.
And I do not believe that anyone could survive a proper complete flaying - as the post above indicates. If bloodloss does not kill you, infection soon would.
Simon
(Adding a title to the short list of Books I Don’t Want to Ever Read)
I don’t see why you couldn’t live through that, unless you died of shock from the pain, or so many blood vessels were nicked that you bled to death. People suffer hideous burns and scalds to the feet and survive. There will be various degrees of scarring and disability (possibly permanent), depending on the depth of the burn, whether it’s a burn or a scald (scalds are usually worse), whether there’s infection, and so on; but loss of foot skin is survivable. Note that a serious burn will probably cost you at least some toes, and contracture of scar tissue may leave you with a smaller foot.
If all else fails you can always amputate the foot. That had to be done to a chemistry student my father knew, who had tried to turn a doorknob while holding carboys of sulfuric acid under each arm.
Well, the title refers to a guild of torturers who engage in acts of torture on orders from the ruling class. They are like doctors and enact these punishments in precise, clean, and only causing the pain that’s necessary to the punishment. Perverse, yes, and tough to read in parts, but the series goes on for a long time after the torture bits.
So if the person survives the flaying, and surgical precision used to prevent excessive blood loss, the person would very likely live?
Well, I’m not talking about burns. I’m talking about having all the skin of the foot taken off. Is that the same as a burn? Would the skin grow back from the incision line down? Or would it generate from the scab that forms over the foot? Could normal function be restored, or would the foot always be painful or distorted by scar tissue?
This is pretty gross for me, who is pretty wussy about such things, but since I read this book, I have wondered how the woman in question would recover from the flaying.
What if you got a fetus?