Monday, 6 October 2025

Medical Monday; Track Marks and Dog Bites, for the Undergrad Team


More medical shennaniganary (is that a word?) for today's post, making more stick-on wounds for the adult robots, for the Undergrad team.


Undergrads (4th year medical students) are one of our regular courses, and a handy test-bed for prototype fake wounds as they have a very open, friendly, and innovative faculty.  One of the scenarios we do on the first week involves a patient with old, semi-infected injection marks on their arms, to represent a regular drug user.  When I started, we just used paper cut-outs glued to the robot.


However, I found some scrap arm skins in the spares box, and set to work. The first passes with the bruises were a little on the dark side, and needed diluting down.


Bruises from yellow acrylic and make-up, and puncture marks with a soldering iron. Veins with diluted skin marker.



They don't look too bad on the robots, toned down a bit. Better than paper cut-outs, anyway.


One of the other scenarios was a dog bite, that goes infected. This was the first of these wounds I ever did, so it was a bit basic; skin belt with puncture marks done with a soldering iron.

Trouble is, it was a bit of a rush-job, and the faculty did try to subtly point out to me, it was a bit on the big side, as if our poor victim had been bitten after a pint or two one evening at The Slaughtered Lamb. Don't Go Out On The Moors, Lads.


I needed a slightly more realistic size, and don't have a dog. I also didn't think going to the kids ward and finding our emotional support puppy, and getting it to bite a robot, would go down massively well so resorted to another raid on the paediatric props box.


grrr, nom nom nom nom nom. A more realistic size stencilled on.


There we go; a bit of fake blood into the wounds, some bruising and raised veins for the infection, and much better. Though I'm thinking of a slightly more subtle mk.3 version soon, maybe over the summer.







 

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