Originally posted by Trevor Marriott
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Last week in one of my posts to which you replied in which we were discussing your experts opinons regarding how long a body would take to bleed out. I stated thst there is no defintive answer to that and that your experts were clearly saying what you wanted them to say to fit with your theory. At that time you challenged me to ask Dr Biggs my expert the same question which I did, and i have posted his reply below which clearly shows there can be no definitive answer to that question
Question to Dr Biggs
"In relation to one particular victim Mary Nicholls who had her throat cut and her body only subjected to minor abdominal wounds with no attempt made to remove organs can I ask how long it would approx take for her body to bleed out, if at all?"
Dr Biggs answer
"Your question sounds like it “should” be fairly simple to answer, but as always there are hidden complications. TV and movies usually show a cut throat leading to almost instantaneous collapse / death, but in reality it will take at least a short period of time for blood loss to become so great that it causes unconsciousness, followed by death after another additional period of time. Depending on the blood vessels severed, this will vary, but even in a worst (best?) case scenario, where the carotid arteries and jugular veins have all been cut open, it will still take many seconds or even several minutes for the accumulated blood pumped / leaked out to reach a level where it actually results in death. A victim could potentially survive for a surprising length of time with a cut throat, gradually bleeding to death. Also, the rate of bleeding slows as the blood pressure drops, so after an initial rush of blood there may be a relatively long period of collapsed survival, where a severely weakened or unconscious person clings on and on until the remaining blood necessary to prove fatal finally ebbs away.
However, other factors may prevail before a victim has had a chance to die from blood loss alone. For example, if the windpipe has also been cut open by the blade, there is the potential for blood to enter the airways and lungs, causing a more rapid death due to choking or “aspiration” (a bit like drowning, only with blood entering the lungs rather than water). A perhaps less-frequently talked about, but definitely relevant, factor is the process whereby air enters the circulation via open blood vessels. When a large neck vein is severed, especially in an upright person, air effectively gets “sucked” into the vein (blood is constantly in the process of being drawn back to the heart through the circulation, and gravity is also pulling it downwards if you are upright, creating a negative pressure in the neck veins that sucks air in as soon as there is a hole in the vessel wall). Once air has been drawn into the heart, it ceases to work very well as a pump – it is really good at pumping liquid, but cannot shift gas very well at all… so simply ends up “churning” the air within the heart, rather than pumping out any blood. This can lead to a very rapid collapse – within a few seconds, and certainly faster than you might expect due to blood loss alone. This phenomenon (cardiac air embolism) reveals itself at post-mortem examination in the form of a tell-tale “froth” of tiny bubbles within the right side of the heart, and we see this relatively frequently following stabbings and other incidents where injuries have resulted in damage to blood vessels in the neck and other areas.
So in summary, a person could feasibly last a surprisingly long time with a cut throat when considering blood loss alone as a potential cause of death, but there are other mechanisms that might cause death more quickly, including within a matter of seconds. This could potentially explain, for example, a scenario where “not enough” blood has been found at a crime scene, for example.
www.trevormarriott.co.uk
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