I want to give a character of mine a wound infection on his leg. Something severe enough to raise the stakes, but not lethal. Something that would be interesting to write about. The setting is very much pre-modern in terms of medicine.
Lots of worms can live in a non-life-threatening wound for long periods of time. Some can’t reproduce in a wound because they require a gastrointestinal tract.
So it could be a single, small worm that prevents the wound from healing, is only painful enough to be inconvenient, and can’t easily be removed without cutting off a large chunk of flesh.
Yeah. Worms are what I wanted to write as well…the Guinea worm (Dracunculus medinensis),sometimes also called medina worm, is one of these and was once really common. The Asclepius rod is possibly coming from it.
If your character has a backstory that brings him to southern Europe, Asia or Africa in these times it’s basically perfect.
Another disease to look up: Larva migrans cutanea
Yeah, was thinking to make up a giant-ringworm.
Rings of 5-10cm across.
Ringworm is, in fact, a fungus. Not an actual worm.
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Balefire scarring.
It’s a radiation burn but it sounds cooler.
Honestly, WoT balefire scarring would be epic as fuck. You had a foot replaced when you were young by a wizard,.and in the future the jerk gets balefire’d so hard that his entire lifespan back to when you got your foot replaced is undone.
The charactes’s foot appears as a ghostly flicking outline, like the false light if you stare at something too bright for too long. It can make a few marks, but is not solid enough to support the character.
This could just be a clever detail, or it could be a setup for an epic campaign.
Can’t beat the classic
Not a real response to your question, but the first thing I thought of (it’s not an infection):
The scarring from a lightning strike can, to me at least, look hauntingly beautiful.
If you’re writing in any sort of fantastical setting you can just make up a non-life threatening infection that mimics it.
Brown Recluse bite. It’s not the venom, it’s the subsequent bacterial infection, or so I’ve heard.
Jeffrey Rowland has one.
Personally I’d go with a large painful burn scar with an interesting story, or a battle wound that reopens from time to time or causes some other limitations. “It never fully healed” ala Frodo Baggins.
A person walking around in premodern times with a semi permanent but nonlethal infection would strain believability for me.
https://insecthive.com/maggots-in-medicine-flesh-eating-larvae-that-heal-wounds-1-17714/
Maggots can be used to clean wounds as they can discern between living and dead tissue. Pretty fucking metal.
Not an infection, but this guy I know had an accident and they had to graft a muscle from on side of his arm to the other and now his hand’s all twisted.
I once had something that would erupt in pus whenever I had a small wound anywhere on my body (and delay healing significantly). It was kinda living inside of me, clawing it’s way out.
Bleh. I once had a huge infected area (don’t ever do skin picking people) on my leg. Definitely sucked, though not something worth writing a chapter or two about.
Some tics infect people and animals with an allergy against red meat.
The dog of our friends go this…
Maybe something in the teeth? That’ll make me close one eye.
wound infection on his leg
A cluster of human bot fly larva.
