• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Healing in Altearth

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
My main character, Frederick of Hohenstaufen, has the ability to heal. This led me into a consideration of how magic would work into medicine in my world. Here are my notes, including stuff specific to Frederick. It may be worth stating that while I have a kind of magic system, the people in my stories are unaware of its existence, so they've made up their own. Many of them.


There are different kinds of healers in Altearth. Some work mainly with medicines, using magic to enhance efficacy. Some are surgeons, setting bones or sewing flesh, using magic to guide the hand, prevent infection. Others are healers, herbalists mostly. In a village, a wise woman might be part herbalist, part midwife, part seer, while the blacksmith or barber can set a bone and a tailor might be able to sew you up. Any of these might be able to use magic or magical-seeming methods to supplement the tools of the trade.

Doctors are for cities. They treat the wealthy. They’re usually literate. They never do surgery, but mix medicines and can sedate someone for the surgeon. They also tend to do a lot of dietary advice, exercise or rehab advice. Consultants.

My MC, Frederick, can heal, though neither he nor anyone else would call him a healer. He's simply a king who has a healing touch. Most kings have or claim to have the ability to heal, generally or something specific (e.g., scrofula).

Touch is a key element in Frederick’s healing magic; he has to be able to put hands on the victim. He also speaks, but it’s not a spell, it’s just words of comfort that help him concentrate but which also helps the injured. But there is a certain power in his words that grows with his skill. He can also calm a falcon or dog or horse.

There is also regular medicine involved. A poultice or potion, and he becomes knowledgeable in this.

As he is first learning, this is all pragmatic—finding and collecting and experimenting. Later it will be theoretical and he starts reading and collecting books. When he’s unable to save his falcon, Grifo, he realizes he has to move beyond pragmatic learning.

He does not take on the injury or poison himself. Rather, he experiences the injury as a sequence of colors, a quieting of noise or a cacaphony, scents going from putrid to sweet, tastes, sensations of touch. All or any, unpredictably. It is akin to what he experiences from one of Zatar’s mushrooms (Zatar is the mysterious wizard who instructs him as a child). These sensations he tries to control at first, then gradually learns to deal with them (even though sometimes they can overwhelm) and see clues in them.

That’s what he experiences, but the healing itself is a more of a maze or other puzzle. He’s in a room he must escape, a forest through which he must find a way. A mechanism to repair. A broken web. A sky full of jumbled constellations. He never knows what it will be, but he recognizes it as what he must do.

If it’s an injury he understands, like a broken bone, it’s just a repair job. A disease or poison is harder because the illness fights back. Still more difficult is a curse, for it is intentional and can have wards and even weapons of its own. The healer can lose.

Most difficult of all is age. This is really multiple system failures. A skilled healer can respond to one or two, but at some point there are too many. It’s possible to have multiple healers at work (on a king, e.g.), but they can interfere with each other. Frederick instinctively avoids any magical projects involving the unnatural prolongation of life, though he's interested in the dividing line between the prolongation of life and simply healing the old.

Since there's such a range of methods and experiences and theories among healers, there's ample room for discussion and debate among them. I doubt I'll use any of it in-story, but it's there as background and helps keep the whole bsuiness of healing mysterious and unreliable and occasionally miraculous.
 
Top