How is a broken nose dead cells? How does a cut equal dead cells? Dark magic can't be healed. Why? Perhaps, it's simply because whatever it destroys, it truly kills. It's why George's ear couldn't be grown back or Moody couldn't restore parts of his body (or, magic simply can't do that much healing to totally replace a limb, I don't think we're told). On the other hand, splinching in canon can be healed, but it seems as though there is a time limit. Why? well, blood loss, most likely, which is literally the exact same issue as shock. Cells no longer get fresh oxygen and start to die.

While I agree with the overall notion that magic isn't something that can logically explained, we're not logically explaining magic here. We're explaining why a human body reacted the way it did to magic. And, we know how the human body reacts.

Personally, I think the ancient idea of micro/macrocosm is a good way to understand this idea without slipping into modernist logic. What is true in the macro signifies the micro. It is a theory many ancient civilizations built their cosmology from, and it centered around the body. So, the macrocosm of a human body and human life signifies the microcosm of life in the tiniest part of the body. There is literally no difference between one and the other.

EDIT: (should have finished reading your post) Chapter 23.

That's the scene I'm talking about. Moreover, it also falls into the general definition of insane: In a state of mind which prevents normal perception, behaviour, or social interaction; seriously mentally ill. (Oxford Dictionary, s.v. "Insane"). Yet, looking at it in this way also avoids having to explain why Wizards and Witches would use Muggle-specific meanings (Insane as a term that started in psychology but is now used and defined mainly in the court system).

 

So you're saying here: dark magic is responsible for the inability to heal in various cases, that's what separates a curse from a charm and I agree.

I agree and that was my point.

The Longbottoms were a victim of a dark curse and their insanity is untreatable because of dark magic, not because of hypoxic brain injury. I think you're trying to apply muggle pathophysiology to that process and that's faulty because generally where there is non-dark magic physical damage it is easily repaired. The pathology resisting treatment is magical, not muggle.

If you say that the response to the magic was a muggle pathological sequela then why can't they treat that easily as in every other physical illness?

To say it in a clearer way: I believe you're saying that Dark magic does X and that X affects the body which is made of various parts which we understand in muggle sciences to give rise to Y and therefore Y is perfectly understandable. For example: A. George's ear is hit by a dark cutting curse. Y. The cells that remain on the face dividing head from pinna are rendered unstable secondary to trauma and inflammation or whatever and apoptose and Die. B. There are no magical or muggle methods that allow the ear to be restored or replaced. Where I take issue is you saying that between A and B the process is explainable in muggle terms and the novel effect is purely relevant to healing, not the symptoms or pathology themselves.

It makes as much sense for me to say that all the Longbottoms brain cells are respiring normally, were never physically damaged, all synapses correctly aligned and firing and they are insane despite this because that's what prolonged cruciatus curse exposure does.

I fall into the camp that Sesc explained well earlier - a curse does something and its effect is its effect - One can't explain how it works with muggle science, it's not a scientific process. No more than the levitation charm or the killing curse. You can certainly describe it in a way that makes sense with muggle scientific words but it has no value.

Your argument sounds much the same to me as the earlier one regarding PTSD, except you've decided it's neurogenic rather than psychogenic.

Where spells aren't involved, I think the question of mental illness in wizards is interesting, because wizards ably cope with physical illness but much of the rest of human experience is unchanged.

EDIT:
Thanks for the quote, I looked through my book box, and I'm literally only missing OoTP and Deathly Hallows, which is frustrating.

Looking at the quote, obviously there's not a huge amount to deal with, but regarding the specific muggle processes - her behaviour - humming, giving him an item of some value to her with no description of dystonic movements but rather timid, and tottering. It sounds much more like mental illness - what we'd call negative symptoms.

Going beyond the actual text, I think it's clear from the description here that what Rowling was aiming for (with what Dumbledore said and what she showed here) was a tragic 'insanity' and loss of personhood rather than bodily health, not brain injury, which commonly are more cerebral palsy/stroke like in appearance.

 

Except, I'm not arguing that as much as I'm arguing they react in the same way to the same cause. Neville falls off his broom. Neville breaks his wrist. Harry falls off his broom. Harry breaks his arm. Draco gets cut. Draco bleeds. There is no reason not to then assume person is suffocated, person dies. And, if that is true, then so should the micro of that be true—a cell is suffocated, a cell dies.

The difference between Muggle and Magical bodies doesn't seem to be in the biology as two Muggles can produce a magical child. Instead, it seems, at least to me, as though it is in the way the magic protects or increases healing in the magical body. If that is true, then it seems very much within the realm of possibility if not plausibility that dark arts cancel the ability for other magic to heal, leaving the body to its original defenses. And, since the body can't regenerate ears, legs, eyes, bring cells back from the dead, and so on, you get Moody, George, and Neville's parents.

 

Snape demonstrated the ability to heal a wound inflicted by dark magic in book 6, so I don't put much stock in this. At the time, he says that his ability to get to it soon enough helps, so maybe there's also a time element before the 'cursed' nature of it really sets in.

 

Applying science and magic at the same time is dangerous. I agree with others; the relationship canon-magic and science have to each other is, I feel, similar to the relationship between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity.

Understanding in one field =/= Understanding in overlapping parts of fields.

I call it the Rationality Uncertainty principle?

Continuing in your vein of thought, nothing prevents a wizard from summoning specific stem cells and healing all injuries.
One could theoretically summon germ cells, cause it to become pluripotent and somehow structure them to prevent aging(using charms only) and treat all injuries.

I concede it is possible that wizards may not have reached that level yet, but any enterprising muggleborn could do it( given sufficient time and wizardpower). Since we hear no whisper of such in the books, it is probable that this is not possible.

 

All the examples of damage you listed are muggle in origin, a fall causing a break. I don't think the idea that a curse causes damage in the same way necessarily follows. Because it's not the same cause.

Besides, wizards also breed with goblins and Giants, and we know from WoG that muggle borns are the product of ancestral wizards/squibs. I know they are humanoid certainly, but they have the ability to interspecies breed- suggesting either they're not human or as humans they have biological capacities that we don't.

I suspect we'll have to agree to disagree.

@Distended Destiny2018 Why would a muggle born with a sufficient magic educational background know to try? They leave muggle education in year six, they don't appear to go to muggle university.

 

True, but it was also a wound from a curse Snape invented. Curse/Countercurse. I'd think that would be just as important. Moreover, you're right about a time, but that time was so there would be scarring. It does seem to strike against the idea of Dark Arts not being healed, but I also wonder how much that is fanon vs. canon. I really can't remember at the moment.

 

Yes, but over the years wouldn't at least a few muggle borns have tried getting distance education?(because of Voldemort's reign of terror for example) Or gone to muggle universities after Hogwarts?

There is a possibility that such things don't happen (at least by Harry's time) but the 2000s would have definitely boosted their capabilities.

 

I assume they don't at all. I mean, Ginny gets possessed by a horcrux over the course of a year and then her parents make everything better by telling her what a fool she was to trust a magical item where she couldn't see it's brain. Mind you, the sorting hat is in the same room at the time. Not to mention a bunch of magical portraits.

And Harry deals with something really traumatic at the end of every year of school and never gets any counseling whatsoever, and in fact is kept in isolation after seeing Cedric murdered and then being tortured by Riddle, which is a completely terrible idea to supposedly "helping" his mental well-being.

I have a hard time finding any post Hogwarts story that doesn't involve a burnt out, jaded, PTSD Harry to be believable after all the shit he goes through in the books.

 

Why on Earth would you get out of Hogwarts and decide you want to study infinitely less valuable fields? Engineering and science are used to create solutions to problems wizards solved ages ago. There's no benefit to understanding the physics of the HP world when Magic doesn't care about it.

"why do brooms fly? Because they exert upwards pressure of greater than 9.8m/s^2" get out of here. They fly because of magic. Never once has it been demonstrated in HP magic that a fundamental understanding of the underlying physical reality has any bearing on magic. In fact, magic can do what it does without any understanding of what's going to happen at all.

People who try to make science describe magic are delusional.

 

Errr... I mean someone might have tried but they wouldn't have gone to muggle schooling since primary school. Why on earth would they feel the need to do 7 years of remedial work to get proficient in something as pointless as say physics when they could spend that time on something both useful and interesting like magic?