#Ravyn being a neuro specialist pre-reset means I've been pondering a LOT what she would still know instinctually from her residual memories

[high-voltage-rat]

(Tags by @asylumdream)

Okay so firstly: so true about the neurotransmitter problem gang. The concept of empathetic magic is discussed in the book The Study of Forbidden Magicks- and sounds like it was used to treat mental health disorders, at the cost of the practitioner taking on those emotions herself. Trying to purge them from herself when they became unbearable ended up going wrong, and it became a forbidden magic in Azaveyr, which I think is really interesting. I honestly find it the most interesting type of magic and would love to see the lore explore it more.

BUT ALSO: THE IDEA OF THE JANKY RESET BEING RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS IS SO REAL. The idea of healthcare practitioners being remade in the new world, but their practice was so innate to their being that they carry forward the things core to that practice. People who used to be nurses not knowing why they know how to give an IV, but they know it's needed and they can save a life. Pathologists waking up in a post-reset world just innately understanding that the world of the microscopic is responsible for the plagues of the world, the process of disease control as obvious to them as the colour of the sky. Former pharmacists throwing themselves into alchemy, making tinctures and salves, looking at the people in their lives who are struggling, and feeling like there's something missing, something that they should be able to give that could help. Post-reset psychiatrists and psychologists to whom the phrases "cognitive behavioural therapy" or "psychoanalysis" no longer exist, but the process of coaching people through coping with their thoughts and emotions still comes naturally. Physicians wondering why they feel, in the depths of their heart, that the cause of a certain ailment is a particular organ nobody else even knows about- that they could fix it if they just had more power at their fingertips.

People feeling the voids of the reset, like reaching for a memory you're sure you have, but just can't reach. Like knowing you just had a crazy dream, but can't recall anything concrete. Like walking into a room and realizing you've forgotten why you entered- just that there was something you needed to do.

I often wonder what the actual state of medicine as a field is in dragonfable. We see that Magus Neron has a microscope, petri dishes, and hypodermic syringes. We know that the existence of cells is a known thing. Clearly we're not living in a pre-germ theory equivalent. But we also don't really see doctors around- alchemists like Alina seem to be the pick. Sir Junn is the only example I can really think of, and he also seems to be oriented towards alchemical solutions like the royal honey and corruption-cleansing potions, though we do have mentions of him using IVs in an ICU in his field hospital.

Healing potions would certainly be good for physical injuries, but I wonder at how well they treat illnesses and diseases. Are they a cure-all that's become so heavily relied on that, in the rare cases they don't work, nobody knows what else to do? Riadne's arachnomancy healing, delivering potions directly into the bloodstream, is treated as revolutionary, so I assume that pills or IV drips and infusions have not been popularized enough to be commonly used. Is that because potions as they currently exist are good enough for most applications, or because most people don't know how to use them, or because they're difficult to create or get ahold of? There are incredible technologies out there, as evidenced by the magisterium's drones and the gnomes'... everything. But whether or not these advances have ever been applied to medical applications has also never really been shown.

We've seen many examples of healing magic in lore, but the capabilities and limitations of it, as well as the actual process, are never really explored. Is it an actual active process of changing the body, or is it just empowering the natural healing process? We know that fleshweaving is a thing, but forbidden as an art due to its potential for abuse (and the fact that it apparently requires consuming elemental spirits), and Jaania's soulweaving-based healing of Brittany was a method she apparently invented through experimentation. So we can conclude that soul/fleshweaving are not being employed as a tool for medicine, and any commonly used healing magic probably doesn't modify the body in such a way.

There's lots of potential for medical technology and practice to improve, so one has to wonder what factors are at play to ensure they don't. Is it just reliance on the magic that already exists, leaving the people with rare cases to be untreated? I wonder if, to a degree, there's a perception of standard alchemy being "good enough" that medicine doesn't need to be improved. Perhaps that's compounded with some cultural taboos around "messing with" or manipulating the body, which may extend beyond magical practice into the scientific sphere. It could even be an acceptance of a flawed paradigm surrounding healing magic, just like how most mages accepted the leyline model of mana as absolute, when soulthreads demonstrate that it's flawed?

Or maybe the devs intended it all to remain in the mcguffin realm, where healing magic does everything you want when it's convenient and is limited only when necessary. But that's less fun to think about.