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The evaluation and mitigation of injury in the automotive crash environment is often achieved by monitoring and limiting the magnitude of forces and/or moments being applied to or transmitted through dummy structures representing particular portions of the human anatomy. Examples of body areas where this is the practice are the neck, the thoracic and lumbar spine, the pelvis, as well as the upper and lower extremities. Implicit within this process is the assumption that the observed forces are directly proportional to local failure metrics such as stress and/or strain. However, a variety of experimental efforts have demonstrated that many of these anatomical structures exhibit, to various degrees, viscoelastic behavior and time or rate dependent failure properties. This work develops a methodology that generalizes the results of various experimental observations.