Current procedures employed to develop injury indices for use in automotive safety research are limited, by necessity, to obtaining a series of observations on experimental subjects of resulting injuries which are a result of forces or velocities imposed on body segments. What is sometimes desired in this process is knowledge of the relevant stresses and strains within the body segment. Such data would assist in a better understanding of current injury criteria and the mechanisms that lead to injuries. This technical note reports, in a qualitative fashion, on a preliminary attempt to utilize DYNA3D (1), a finite element computer code, to compute the stress and strain fields of a thorax-like structure subject to impact.