They are not medical professional but I presume that they do their research and talk to medial professional. Possibly not to that extent that the person who wrote the blog intended, but they needed the information that Sherlock had (blood loss, shock, bullet wound, which way to fall... ).
The lines Molly had that it's not like in the movies and that there is not a strong impact and you don't fall several meters backwards sound pretty right to me as if coming from an expert.

And I think if one is really interested in this question and knows next to nothing about medicine and anatomy and bullet wounds (and I guess that can be said about most of us here), one should firstly read some general literature on medicine, anatomy and all that and after that read various metas on the topic. Because quite frankly: the authors of those metas can tell us almost anything, and I suppose it all sounds pretty impressive and more or less convincing - but how do we know that it really makes sense if we only have... basic knowledge about medicine, anatomy...? 

What we need is a meta written by a medical professional WHO ISN'T a Sherlockian....

nakahara wrote:

There is also another slight problem with all those medical theories – every person′s body is unique and even if you presume it will react in a certain way you could still be proven wrong.
 
Some people will not be killed even when pierced through with rusty debris in a traffic accident, being shot into their heads directly or falling from dangerous heights. They will survive somehow and their bodies will heal and be restored to their full functionality again.
 
And some people will just stick themselves into their little finger with a rusty needle while sewing and they′ll die because of an infection.
 
Even as an expert possessing extensive medical knowledge you just cannot really know that somebody will not die if you shoot them directly into their chest. You may presume but it will never be a certainty. So in choosing to wound somebody in such a serious manner you are susceptible to the idea of murdering them. So mentally you are already a killer even if you won′t manage to become one physically.
 

 I think you are right. The question is then: Why did Sherlock tell John this fairy tale about surgery? Did he believe it himself or did he just fool John? Why would he do that?

Sherlock Holmes wrote:

What we need is a meta written by a medical professional WHO ISN'T a Sherlockian....

 
Well, the best I could do was consult my daughter, who is a doctor but not a Sherlockian, about putting a bullet into someone's chest as surgery; she laughed. A lot. To a non-Sherlockian doctor it's ludicrous.

On the other hand she is a Medical Registrar, which is the front line of the action in hospitals, rather than general practise, where acute cases are much, much rarer. On the whole, people who have been shot do not stagger to their GP's offices, and on the whole people do not bleed out in GP's offices.

I did ask her how she would judge quickly whether someone was bleeding internally, so she explained to me the two second test, which is really 2x2 seconds, and demonstrated it on me; press down hard on the fingernail and then release. It should take 2 seconds for the nail to become pink again; any longer than that and there is a serious problem, and if you can't see the patient gushing blood anywhere visible then the patient is probably gushing blood inside.

Again, in fairness, she is in a dual specialisation which relies very heavily on diagnostic abilities as well as clinical skills, and she sees very ill people for much of the time. So, it's possible that some Sherlockian doctors outside acute care specialities might think that it's feasible, particularly if they trained a long time ago when medical students dissected bodies and thought that what they saw was reality. Nowadays medical students don't do that; modern imaging methods have demonstrated that there is a great deal more normal anatomical variation than once was thought to exist, and the way that the hugely complex intertwined structures that make up the human body react to trauma is better understood.

Or, to be more precise, doctors have realised that they don't understand it a lot more than they used to; certainty has taken a bit of a hammering in modern medicine. 

The crunch of the posted meta for me was the distance between bullet entry and heart, two fingers width..or one deep breath.
Had Sherlock breathed deeply or differently as Mary fired the bullet would have been in his heart.
Ultimately it comes down to blind luck he survived a shot like that.
Mary had no way to shoot to save..a shooter cannot calculate breathing patterns..damage on impact or the positioning of organs inside a persons body.
Impossible!
The only thing that is fact is she didn't take a head shot, but it does look like a heart shot.

.....when you eliminate..whatever remains must be the truth.

Last edited by lil (February 27, 2014 5:20 pm)

I enjoyed reading this meta. It took me on a trip down memory lane as the pictures come from an anatomy textbook I used at med school. The author does a good job in explaining why a shot in that particular location is bad news. However that doesn't change the fact that whilst it's definitely not good it's nowhere near as hopeless as being shot directly in the head or heart.

There is no doubt in my mind that it was not Mary's intention to kill Sherlock instantly. On one hand I want to subscribe to a theory that she genuinely didn't want to kill him and she has deliberately chosen to shoot him somewhere where she thought to be relatively safe. With heavy emphasis on relatively, there is no safe place to shoot a person.

There is a possibility however that she wanted Sherlock dead and she hoped that he is going to bleed out. She wanted to make sure however that he remains alive long enough for John too busy himself trying to save him rather than perusing the shooter.
It may become clear in the next season what her true intentions were. Or we may never find out what was going through her mind when she pulled the trigger.
 

Swanpride wrote:

I clarify: Every alternative shot aimed to the body and not to the limb.

@lil The Meta I linked to actually considered that Mary would only know which places would be a safe kill shot, which places would work for a slow and painful dead and which places are not really suitable for her line of work, but not a very important detail which was most likely the reason Sherlock bleed out so fast.

It even considered that Mary wouldn't be able to see Sherlock's upper body, since he was still clothed.

Thank you for acknowledging that your original statement was incorrect.

It considered a lot of things but unfortunately it shows an alarming lack of acknowledgement of normal anatomical variation as well as an alarming lack of acknowledgement of abnormal anatomical variations involved in such conditions as situs inversus.

I fully recognise that a GP, or any medic not involved in acute care, may simply not have the experience to know just how dangerous shooting someone in the chest is, but that doesn't make it any safer. It just means the medic is ill informed; you are trying to advance this as evidence that Mary was doing 'surgery' but there is no such evidence.
 

Crikey I didn't think this would cause THIS much debate! As I know it has been trawled over so many times before - the reason I posted it wasn't necessarily because of the anatomical theorising of the post.

What threw me completely was, from the screengrabs, that it MIGHT not have been Mary who called the ambulance. It COULD have been CAM. He's leaning down in the background to where the phone was that Mary, according to Sherlock, called 999.

For me, through all of the anatomical diagrams and medical jargon, that part was the most interesting. I had not thought of it at all. We see, but we do not observe?