Big hello to all the medical workers here and a bit lesser one to everybody else.

I've got a situation in my fic where a character tries to become an apprentice to Madam Pomfrey. She's sceptical of the candidate and tries to bury her under a ton of medical literature before she can agree.

So, imagine for a moment you're an esteemed Mediwitch at Hogwarts. A wee third year comes up to you and claims she's ready to learn all the stuff you sometimes teach to select one or two post-OWLs aspiring healers.

What subjects said third year should study her bony derriere off before you even consider her as a personal apprentice?
Specific books maybe? It would be perfect if you can name several British anatomy books from late XIX-early XX century.

Thanks in advance!

 

Invent some stuff that's healthcare adjacent, but relates to magic. We need math to calculate drug dosages, so what would that look like in terms of potions? Do potions come in doses? Can patients be allergic to boomslang skin? Are there different routes of administration? Do magic folks use veins with infusions, ever? Or is it all orally taken?

How does magic work with the body? Is there any fundamental difference between magical bones and muggle bones? Wizarding sports seem to be a lot more dangerous than any muggle sports; does that imply an increased resilience in wizard children? Cause any fall off of a broom would be death for a muggle person, but wizards and witches don't seem to care.

You could try to base your entire healing system on exactly what we do in reality, but that's not nearly as fun or as interesting as figuring out what weird stuff magic does to it all.

Plus, it gives you the freedom to do whatever you want. No one'll complain about the accuracy of your medical knowledge because "It's magic, I don't gotta explain shit." Make up some books about how ley lines can affect how someone is healed, so the student has to learn about all of that.

Maybe wizarding children all go through a routine when they're young that we as muggles can't do. Appendixes are widely regarded as useless, so maybe all wizarding children have their appendix vanished when they're four.

The best part about working with Rowling's setting is that she didn't explain anything very well, so you can go wild and have fun.

 

But why do you want older, possibly outdated anatomy books? (although to be fair, it's not like human anatomy has changed and some of those older ones are still very relevant today, some have incredibly detailed drawings) And why do they need to be real? Just make one up.

 

Same as America on the textbook front. A third year would probably be told to look at some of the specific NEWT concepts we see in Potions, transfiguration and Charms. Not to reach that standard but to begin to build a familiarity before she reaches there, that’s the sort of thing they’d use. The fractions for antidotes that we see in HPB.

Certainly, I don’t think the student would be advised to study things which won’t directly help with their achieving the grades they need to pursue becoming a healer post Hogwarts. Anatomy would be a distraction. For real world parallels, I’m a British doctor, I also used to teach anatomy at a university to medical students; there was always one or two students who said they’d been reading up on bones/anatomy since they were a kid. It provided only a week or two of advantage.

Instead, at Hogwarts, I imagine students interested in becoming healers would instead be told to focus on — in addition to their curriculum and exams — the extra-curriculars that would give them an advantage in applications. Quidditch captain, prefect, an instrument, writing into papers and going for some of those prizes in the trophy cupboard, maybe. Stuff like that. Happily, these are also magical things that would be interested to write and read about. Rather than the partitions of endolymph and perilymph in the organ of corti, or some other bullshit or whatever.

 

Thanks the answers guys.

As for the outdated books, I've got an idea basing on that. Wizarding contempt for science -> using outdated Muggle medical knowledge for reference -> room for improvement -> venturing into the Muggle world.

As to magic and factual accuracy: haven't you ever cringed while reading a description of your filed of work by some cluesess idiot who pulls ideas straight out of his butt? I once had a dubious pleasure of reading a retired senior's attempt on convincing the reader he's a dev. It looked like this: "At first, I did one program a year. I wasn't in hurry. I made my buttons pretty and easy to use, so the users started to like my programs. Then, I moved to doing two programs a year".
I really don't want to be that guy.

Thanks for the ideas! I wouldn't have thought about those things. Your message is the reason why an author should regularly consult with specialists.

The keyword is "some". Anatomy aside, there's physiology, microbiology and whatnot the Wizards, healer or no healer, have no business knowing about.

Good points. My thinking is the same, but I need to add some paper weight for aforementioned reasons.

 

In simplified terms for clarity, you have Gallen for Roman era, da Vinci for Renaissance, and several different ones after that. Most modern gross anatomy comes from Netter in the late 1800s.

I'd want my uppity this year to learn what a normal body is before I taught them anything about how to fix an abnormal one, starting with the necessary components to cat spells. If you need hands for that or is an arm enough? Moody shows is you don't need an leg or an eye to cast spells. What do you need?
But if I thought the 3rd year was being stupid and not serious, I'd give them a wizarding puberty book and have them explain it to their peers under supervision.

 

You should have two characters in competition rather than one, to add a bit of extra conflict.

Protagonist is a witchy witch who embraces magic and who has the magical mindset capable of comprehending stuff like humorism being real, matter being composed of the Aristotelian elements rather than Muggle chemistry, and astrology having a significant impact on health.

Antagonist can be a stubborn Muggle-lover insisting on the correctness of Muggle science in the face of it being obviously wrong in a world where magic is real.

Basically, canon Hermione vs. fanon Hermione.

Antagonist has some initial success and early victories but ultimately runs into the roadblock of the fact that their world view is completely wrong, at which point protagonist shits all over them and wins the coveted apprenticeship to Madam Pomfrey.

 

That's your headcanon. It's fine if you want it that way, but nothing in canon suggests that wizardfolk are ignorant of microbiology.

 

From the existence of dragonpox, I think we can assume that wizards are perfectly aware that if you use a Magnifying Charm to look at the blood of a infected person, you will see the microscopic dragons in their blood attacking their cells.

Of course, knowing about it doesn't mean you can prevent it, because even microscopic dragons have a tough hide resistant to magic. The only known treatment is to shrink a team of dragon tamers down to microscopic size, insert them into the body, and have them fight the pox until the body can produce its natural defenders (which obviously take the same form as your Patronus, only microscopic).

 

Taure
Damn it, now you're forcing me to read your fics. Talk about aggressive advertisement.
Those are seriously awesome ideas. I thought about making Wizards believe in Eastern-ish body energies philosophy, but Trelawney-style pseudoesoteric nonsense is the whole league upwards.

Shouldabeenadog
Good points, thank you.

 

I think there's room for both approaches (and others besides). My personal view is that the best way to depict magic is pluralistic. That is, lots of distinct bodies of thought with their own conceptual apparatus and practical pros and cons.

Unlike real life science, which has the property of unity such that everything (in principle) is all part of a single system, I think a good way to show how magic is different to science is by depicting it as fundamentally non-unified. There would be no magical "theory of everything". Just lots of theories of somethings.

This fits nicely with the idea that Muggle logic is alien to wizards, who have their own way of thinking. In the Muggle world, scientific ideas have sufficiently penetrated the public consciousness that people are used to thinking that there must be one way the world is, and developing greater understanding of the world is getting closer to knowing that one truth. Whereas for wizards, their public consciousness would be based on a general understanding that the world can be multiple different ways simultaneously.

But yes, returning to healing, I think traditional folk medicine and witch doctor practices are a gold mine for medical magic. The main thing to beware of when doing this sort of worldbuilding is producing one element which may make something else completely redundant. That's not the end of the world - redundancy exists in real life, usually based on different cost-benefit ratios - but it does need to be thought through. In particular, one must be careful about making too many Charms that do everything, because then everyone would just use those Charms all the time, eliminating interesting variety in the magic being used in the story (potions, herbology, etc).

 

You make me feel like I've missed a couple of years of magical education. Vibrant ideas, these.

To put in my five knuts, I think the two principles the magic scientists should agree upon, are symbolism and exchange. I love the idea of Trials in Lens of Sanity's "An Old and New World". It says that the more trouble a magician goes into for reaching their goal, the more valuable the result will be, thus tying the fate with wand wiggling into the looming grand scheme of time-space-magic.