Medicine in Toriel | World Anvil

Medicine

Medicine in Toriel plays a key role in the quality of life of its inhabitants, and is vital in a land filled with monsters and threats. The magical and the mundane both play a role in the healing and management of diseases and injuries. Common people can access care through churches and temples. Local temples provide care for the sick, and members of the clergy may travel to troubled areas in order to provide free relief in the name of charity. There are also independent herbalists, apostates, and medecins who practice the healing arts and provide their services to the common folk.
  With such limited means of care, people of Thedas therefore learn to make do with the healing fauna and flora that they can find around them. Examples are foxmint for a troublesome gut and spindleweed for afflictions of the lungs.
 

Treatment

Mundane

Some medical practitioners of the day believe in Humorism. Essentially, this theory holds that the mortal body is filled with four basic substances, called humors, which are in balance when a person is healthy. All diseases and disabilities supposedly result from an excess or deficit of one of these four humors. These deficits were thought to be caused by vapors inhaled or absorbed by the body. The four humors are black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Treatments from this school of thought are bloodletting and the application of leeches. The bile of Gurgut is thought to balance the humors. The Kingdom Reza Flames employ breathing exercises to "clear the stale humors". Those practicing medicine are also aware of and perform the amputation of limbs.
  Superstition also plays a large part in people's attitudes towards healing, such as how the removal of a wart requires rubbing the half of a potato on it and feeding the potato to a girros, which should take the wart upon itself. However, some are critical of these non-magical methods. Secluded areas often have to rely on those beliefs to be treated, or druids, shamans, and herbalists can offer natural alternatives and treatments for the sick.
 

Magical

Acolytes, druids and some rare other spellcaster may specialize or learn to manipulate natural forces thanks to Magic to heal, imbuing recipient with restorative energy that is capable of knitting flesh and mending bone. Such spellcasters can also infuse their recipient with beneficial energy that greatly accelerates healing. However, power capable of healing serious injuries is rare, and costs when one can find a capable enough spellcaster, those rare spellcaster can even reattach severed limbs and other miracles.
  Combinations of herbs made into potions are also used. Alchemists and herbalists use those magical herbs to invent new potions and improve upon ones that already exist.
 

Disease and illness

Unfortunately, this world is not spared by the numerous known diseases that we can imagine, and those in addition to some diseases of magical origin. One can think in particular of the diseases that the Garkain spread, necrotizing the tissues, creating pustules of stench all over the body of the victim, and spreading with the simple approach of one of the victims. And this sadly is just an example of the disease that can spread on those lands
 

Infection

A disease could be transmitted in various ways: injury, ingestion, inhalation, or mere contact.
  Once infected, the disease took hold in a body that was not of strong enough constitution. The disease going through an incubation period, before plaguing the creature with its effect.
 

Diseases on Toril

On Toriel, widespread plagues were mostly a problem of the past, the relatively common access to places of cult, where it is easier to find an acolyte with the skill necessary to cure diseases greatly helping to fight the various infections. Nevertheless, diseases still spread in the countryside, where folks tend to be isolated, and lack easy access to modern magic or medicine.
  Another reason for the decrease of plague was that diseases turned into widespread plagues when a population had never encountered them before. Toriel had a long history of interracial intermingling and even crossbreeding. People were exposed to various diseases since childhood and therefore developed immunities and, being the descendants of survivors of plagues, they also inherited immunities from their ancestors. Overall, widespread plagues were not a problem in urban areas but more in isolated rural areas.
 

List of disease


 


Articles under Medicine



Cover image: Farewell by Greg Rutkowski

Comments

Please Login in order to comment!