The Sympathy of Doctors: Farmers, part 3

[sythyry]

Mirrored from Sythyry.

Some time afterwards, and not long before midnight, Estertherio’s day as Summoner was over. She headed off to the Count of Muskrat’s Head, a pleasant sort of tavern half a block from the Healer’s Guild headquarters in Vheshrame, and where the guildmasters gather to confer, discuss, complain, relax, recline, incline, decline, confine, undermine, determine, sine, countersign, cosine, and, of course, go off on tangents.

“You would not believe the day,” she conferred, discussed, complained, relaxed, and etc.ed to the other guildmasters. “This and that happened which was all very serious, so that I did not get my morning meal until after sunout! This plate of roast meat and raisins I am devouring is my luncheon, and it is not long before midnight! And after that — a pile of minor cases! Imagine, a poor farmer’s cosi who lost an antenna — just one — and wants to get it put back on! I hate wasting my own time on impossibilities like that when there are so many serious patients that need attention. Or so much roast meat and raisins who need it at least as much!”

Spurffle, the eldest waiter of the Count of Muskrat’s Head, said, “Your pardon, master-healer, but if you plan to heal that roast, the cook will be sure to break a bottle of fine old Marque Datal over your head. She worked harder on that roast than you worked on any three patients today, and she won’t have her roast unroasted by the likes of a child like you.” He is older than everyone else but me, and feel obliged to be as rude as possible about it.

I poked my head out of the fireplace. I am not often found in Vheshrame anymore, and, even when I lived there, I didn’t spend that much time with the Healers’ Guild. But I was back, trying and failing to arrange for Kismirth’s guild chapter to get a teacher for a year or so. “The solution is obvious to all! The Healer’s Guild of Vheshrame should procure, by honest means involving a great outpouring of lozens to a convenient enchanter, a talisman which reattaches severed limbs!”

Estertherio frowned. “That’s not really the problem: nearly any master-healer could merely reattach the curst thing. Making it useful, now, that’s the slobbering fish of sorrow.” (Yes, she really said ‘slobbering fish of sorrow.’) “And it’s not so much the reattaching of an antenna alone, but the reattaching of a lost finger, ear, toe, hand, foot, tail, penis, tentacle, or what have you.”

“I, personally, have most of those, and wings as well,” I noted.

“Right, wings. And each of those requires a different spell, does it not, master-healer?” She said that “master-healer” in a rather disparaging way, as one does to a fellow guildsman whom one is annoyed with but does not wish to directly spew disrespectful invective upon. The Vheshrame guild isn’t entirely happy with me: perhaps because I devote more time to my other guilds than to them, perhaps because my healerly activities are mostly enchantments which the guild has trouble charging for. (Consider a device which can heal wounds as often as you like. How do you charge for a single use of it? Once you have the device, it costs no extra to use it. But the device is hideously expensive to make, even if I had foregone my profit, which I did not in that instance — so they have to charge for the use of it, somehow. And that’s a spell which nobody else in the Vheshrame chapter can cast at all, making it particularly embarrassing to have around.) Or perhaps because I am a joyous and blatant pervert, of course.

“I’m sure there’s some way to do it all with a single device,” I said. This opinion is based on sound theoretical principles of advanced magic.

“If you can make a device that does it all, you’re a better enchanter than I had imagined, master-healer!”

“I am a better enchanter than you had imagined, master-healer,” I said, musing that with my fairly-newly-acquired Glory of Mircannis, I could probably manage it.

“Well, don’t go making that particular toy until you’ve made us a full set of all the actually life-saving devices we could possibly want,” said Estertherio. “We have enough serious and hard work to do without wasting our time on cosmetics.”

“They’re only cosmetics until your boyfriend’s penis needs reattaching,” said someone who may remain nameless. “Then they’re essential.”

“You are certainly a cruder enchanter than I could imagine, master-healer,” said Estertherio.

Which seemed like a good time to get out of the fireplace, pay my tab, and see if the Rassimel I was trying to meet with had gotten back to the guildhall yet. None of the healers, including me, spared a thought for Elecampagne. That sort of injury happens — not often, but too often. And one cannot go about healing it every time, much as one would actually like to, so one must become callous about it.

Comments

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

"“You are certainly a cruder enchanter than I could imagine, master-healer,” said Estertherio."

The grin!

As for the matter of fretting vs pragmatism... it is of course true (if, for the very kind-hearted, extremely woesome) that one can't heal all injuries in the world. Well, maybe Kvarse could, if she were inclined to waive her usual term of service on a grand scale, but what would be gained by it? If everyone got healed one time, they'd just get hurt again. If they got used to being healed whenever they had a need, some of them would get hurt a lot.

And healing people in need whom one happens to encounter risks causing that same problem on a same scale.

Still, I imagine there are some particularly-generous souls who can't let such a case go by if they come upon it... and from my (admittedly-limited) knowledge of the Tree, it seems they'd never lack for people in need.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

There certainly are people like that! Everyone who joins the Healers' Guild for any good reason spends a while doing that. It is official Guild didactic policy to encourage them at it for as long as they can stand it. Most of us manage a few months of it --- I was quite average at four months --- but a few very devoted Rassimel keep it up for years.

After one recovers from that phase, one is given instruction in the economics of healing, and triage, and similar depressing topics, which would have been lost on one beforehand.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

A device to reattach severed body parts! That would be a fantastically valuable item. How would you charge for the use of it-- well, I'm curious, does the device store cley in some fashion and regenerate the cley, so that its use is limited on a daily basis? If so, then you would figure out how many times it could be used in a day, and how soon you wanted the cost of making it to be recovered. Dividing the cost by these two items could give you a per-usage cost.

On the other paw, imagine that it was capable of healing an unlimited number of injuries instantly; then you are simply limited by the practicalities of guarding access so that patients are not trampled or bullied by others seeking healing, imagining that their needs should come first. That would come about through hiring staff to manage access, wards to prevent people from injuring one another in gaining access, etc. Then you arrive at a 'number of times per day it can be used' through how quickly your staff can pass people through.

Finally however, there is the regrettable concept of 'value through scarcity', which purports that the more scarce access to a service is, the more valuable the service becomes. For those seeking money, it becomes to their advantage to limit the service so that it does not become cheap as air, and so they might well argue that your miraculous device should be well guarded and made available instantly only to nobles; on a waiting list to other patients, in order of their ability to pay lavishly.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

There is some flexibility there. The device could be used once per day for a
certain price, up to an unlimited number of times per day. (The device, in
effect, gets its own supply of cley, or quasi-cley which can only be used to
power the device itself.)

How often would it be used in a day (were it unlimited) is less clear
-- at times a whole day will pass without anyone severing a single body part
in the whole city!

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Which is as most people would prefer it, regards a paucity of body parts being severed. ^_^

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

By the spanglio! I think most people have it right!

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Idealism is not without its costs, certainly; and in time, all but the very, very idealistic are likely to succumb to at least some small measure of cynicism. Or to just hold some reserves in case of truly needful patients, indeed.

I'm rather puzzled, though, that an old, large city like Vheshrame doesn't have anyone else who can manage Heal Truly - professional-level Healoc and Corpador (both of which I'd have expected for someone of even the lowest Master grade), decent memory, and, say, being a Rassimel seem like they ought to add up to the required skill rather handily. (mharreff can almost cast it as of the start of his adventures on Ruskeia, and he of course doesn't have any particular connection to Mircannis. Or Kvarse, but of course that's not all that typical anyway, not like the Rassimel gift with Corpador.) Or does the device to which you referred use something more extravagant, such as Mircannis's Kiss?

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Heal Truly is hard but not that hard; several masters can cast it. We also have a device that can cast it without limit. But it simply restores vitality; it doesn't reattach limbs, nor make them work.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I'd kind of expect every city to have at least one Mircannis' Kiss talisman. I mean, it's a LOT easier to make than a city wall, isn't it?

[rowyn]

People, such as little Ellie, might make very long pilgrimages to a city with such a device, in order to be healed of some long-ago injury that didn't get treatment in time.

[goodluckfox.livejournal.com]

As much magic as there is in this setting I am surprised this is even an issue. Even in our no magic world we can reattach severed limbs and restore some functioning.

[brynndragon.livejournal.com]

Assuming you're referring to the world that I live in, such treatment would almost certainly fail to recover sensory input, even before you consider that the surgery and physical therapy would easily bankrupt the entire village even before the harvest was burned.

(As an aside, it feels like magical healing is far more binary than the sort we have here - either you get some or you don't. Whereas our medicine is all about percentages and trial-and-error, much as we try to pretend otherwise.)

[terrana.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, city walls are regarded as rather essential to being considered a city. Healing devices, while cheaper and quite lovely, are regarded as entirely secondary to having a functional Healers' Guild chapter with minimum outlay on the part of the city's ruler(s).

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Without, I hope, revealing any state secrets of Vheshrame or anyone else, whatever such devices Vheshrame may or may not have, they are most unlikely to be available for free to peasants. I doubt that would be true even in Kismirth.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

Ah. Confusion arose because of reference to "a device which can heal wounds as often as you like." "Wounds" makes me think of simple damage to flesh, the sort which will heal quite handily once vitality is restored.

Even going farther afield than that: The hardest mend-a-specific-injury spell I have on record is Knit the Broken Bone, in the same quantum as Heal Truly; all others - including the one to rejoin attached limbs (though not to restore their function) - are lower complexity. (Actually, not entirely accurate, admittedly, as some of those do mention higher-complexity variants for healing injuries that aren't fresh, and some do put a specific number on it; but they all look lower at a glance.) As the reattach-limbs device was being considered just then, and the statement I mention seemed to be referring to a device already completed, apparently I got lost and fell back to thinking it was just a thing for ordinary true healing.

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

I find it tiring enough to heal the ones that come under my hands, that I don't have energy to seek more out.

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

You have evidently never met Jack, who is the keeper of an ancient and subtle curse....

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I, certainly, do not know Jack.

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

You should make his acquaintance. He's quite a delightful fellow, in spite of the curse. Really, that whole "ripper" nickname comes from a time before he'd learned to control it.

(And yes... you made me laugh).

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

It sounds as if my translator has jumbled things again, for which, apologies.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

I'm somewhat surprised, by the way, that restoring function to a limb is so specific. I'd got the impression that, there as much as here (if with subtle differences in the underlying physical processes), nerve tissue is responsible for carrying instructions from the brain to the rest of the body and vice versa; and that, there as much as here, no matter how well flesh is rejoined to reattach a severed limb (the single spell for which is not THAT hard for very recent severs), it's a failure of nerves to reconnect or regrow that leads to the lack of function.

Is it only in the case of older injuries (not within the past so many seconds, based on the spell's power) that more specific magic is needed to reattach limbs? I'd wonder about the mechanism leading to different limbs needing different spells to restore function, but the technical details might go over my head at that point.

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