El médico pone una venda en la herida.

The doctor puts a bandage on the wound.

Breakdown of El médico pone una venda en la herida.

• en: on
• el médico: the doctor
• poner: to put
• la herida: the wound
• la venda: the bandage

Questions & Answers about El médico pone una venda en la herida.

Why do we use the verb poner here? Could we use colocar or enrollar instead?

Poner is the most common verb for “to put” or “to place” in Spanish. You could use colocar for a slightly more formal tone:
El médico coloca una venda en la herida.
Enrollar means “to roll up,” so it describes wrapping the bandage itself (enrollar la venda), not the act of placing it on the wound.

What’s the difference between venda and curita?

Venda is a strip of cloth or gauze you wrap around a wound or body part. Curita (also called tirita in parts of Latin America) is a small adhesive bandage (like a Band-Aid). Venda is for larger dressings; curita is the little sticky pads.

Why is there the article la before herida? Could we omit it?

In Spanish, we normally use the definite article with body parts or wounds when the context is clear.
El médico pone una venda en la herida.
Omitting it (en herida) sounds incomplete. If you’re introducing the wound for the first time, you could say una herida:
El médico pone una venda en una herida.

Can we use sobre instead of en?

Yes, but it changes the nuance.
Poner una venda sobre la herida
emphasizes “on top of” the wound. En (in/on) is more idiomatic for covering or dressing a wound.

Why do we say una venda and not un vendaje?

A venda is the actual piece of cloth or gauze. A vendaje is the act or the result of bandaging (the dressing as a process). If you refer to the material itself, you use venda. You’d use vendaje to talk about the overall dressing:
El vendaje quedó muy ajustado.

Why is herida feminine?

Spanish nouns have grammatical gender. Words ending in -a are generally feminine. Herida comes from the past participle/adjective of herir (“to wound”) and follows the regular feminine pattern.

How do you pronounce venda?

/v̞ˈbɛn.da/ – two syllables: VEN-da, with stress on the first syllable. The v sounds like a soft b, and the e is like the “e” in “met.”

Why isn’t there an indirect object pronoun like le in the sentence?

The sentence focuses on the action and the object (the bandage and the wound). If you want to specify who receives the action (the patient), you add the indirect object pronoun and the phrase:
El médico le pone una venda en la herida al paciente.
Without that phrase, Spanish often drops the pronoun when the receiver is not explicitly mentioned.