During her residency at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, Deborah Kuhls, MD, had been taught how to handle what's known in the trade as penetrative trauma—stabbings, impalements, gunshots. Then, as a surgical fellow at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, Maryland, she underwent an education in blunt-force injuries, which are often considerably harder to diagnose: A body battered in a car crash tends to yield fewer clues than a gunshot wound—the damage can be invisible to the untrained eye.
“If you're going very fast, and then suddenly you're not, the floppy parts of your body—your intestines, your kidney, your liver—will keep going,” Dr. Kuhls says. “That's just plain physics. And our brain is floating in our skull, surrounded by fluid. But…
