What does it mean to be "mortally wounded"?
The only source I could find for a definition of this phrase was Wikipedia, which states a mortal wound "leads directly to the death of the victim. Death need not be instantaneous, but follows soon after." The rest of the article seems like speculation.
The crux of my question is these two points:
- Must a mortal wound lead to death?
- Is declaring that something is a mortal wound equivalent to saying that death is certain and unavoidable in the present situation?
For example, if a wound is bad enough that the victim will bleed out unless he receives appropriate medical attention immediately, is the wound a mortal wound? Could the same wound be a mortal wound in one situation and not in another, depending on whether such attention is available? That is, does a mortal wound describe the wound itself, or the result of that wound?
Solution 1:
Not only must a mortal wound lead to death, but it must have led to death. "Mortal" means the victim has passed. "Mortal" does not mean "potentially mortal if left untreated". Because then every wound is mortal. You can die from a papercut. In fact Wikipedia goes on to explain just that.
Likewise, when Wikipedia says "Death need not be instantaneous, but follows soon after", it refers to the past, not the future. It means to say that whether or not the death was instantaneous, if you can pin it down to a particular wound, then that wound was mortal.
And yes, mortal wound describes the wound itself. It does not describe the result of that wound. The word for the result is death.
Solution 2:
As @mplungjan has said, I would suggest that it describes the result of the wound. For other contexts you could use expressions like:
The wound nearly proved fatal (mortal).
It would/may have been a mortal wound had he not been treated so promptly.
Unless the wound actually proved fatal ('mortal'), any other attributed meaning would be speculative.
Solution 3:
"Mortally wounded" is used to describe a wound that has already killed somebody.
If used to describe a wound on a living person/animal, then in common usage it would be implied that either you think the person is going to die from the wound, or you have foreknowledge that the person is going to die, such as a narrator in a story.
If someone was wounded, but recovered, then another description should be used, such as "critically wounded" or "severely wounded".