What are your headcanons regarding Healers and Wizarding medicine in general?

DrSarcasm's thread kind of touched on this, but I'm more interested in the profession itself, as I've never actually seen a fic that really tried to explore it.

When surgery is (rarely) needed, do they use specialized teams of Healers? One to focus on potions, another on charms, another on transfiguration, etc?

Or are their specialties symptoms-based, on the order of Spell Damage, Artefact Accident, Creature-Induced Injuries, etc? Does this make more magical sense than the systems-based medicine Muggles use (enterologist, neurologist, cardiologist)?

What about disabilities? Is being a Squib the only wizarding disability that can happen? Are wizards immune to the effects of extensive inbreeding: hemophilia, muteness, deafness, etc?

Do wizards have diagnostic test spells? Monitoring spells for heart rate and blood pressure and O2 saturation? Basic screens for organ function?

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Here's my personal headcanon: Healers are a female-dominated occupation. Disregarding trauma or pathology, there's one natural biological phenomenon that occurs that still requires serious medical intervention: childbirth.

So it follows that the first healers were women who've experienced childbirth before and knew what to expect and what would be needed (analgesics!).

Muggle witchburnings have mostly wiped these female healers out, but I'd suspect that actual Witches would have a much better chance of staying hidden and escaping a terrible death. Fast forward to the future, and they're still leading the field in clinical potions and charms.

 

Being a squib is not a disability. Squibs are muggles born to wizards. Unless you consider being a muggle a disability.

 

One thing I dislike in fanon is the old "I'll use a spell to tell me what's wrong with you" approach. Firstly it doesn't feel very Harry Potterish - the whole holographic interface/visualisation idea, it's an expression of magic we very rarely see. Secondly it makes healing somewhat boring and easy, at least the diagnosis side of things.

My preference is for magical healers to have to diagnose in much the same way Muggles do: by looking at the symptoms and by performing specific (magical rather than scientific) tests. No instant single spell or collection of spells that allows you to know immediately what's going on in a person's body.

The idea of healing as female dominated somewhat contradicts canon, depending on the level of domination you're considering, as Arthur Weasley's healer was male.

 

Do you not?

 

Well, if you put it that way...

 

I've checked healers on the wiki and after rejecting movie (and GB game) characters I've got this:

Male:
Abasi, Omar
Bonham, Mungo
Lancelot
Poke, Rutherford
Pye, Augustus
Smethwyck, Hippocrates
Spleen, Helbert

Female:
Calderon, Josephina
Derwent, Dilys
de Gorsemoor, Gunhilda
Pomfrey, Poppy
Strout, Miriam

7:5 for males. Twelve characters is not nearly enough to assume much, but I think it puts a wedge into theory about healers being female dominated profession.

 

I'd add a caveat to that.

There are spells that will tell you what's wrong with you for many diseases but they only give you a yes or no answer to "does the patient have this disease?". Given there is a million and one different things that could be wrong with someone it's only useful as the final confirmation.

I'd also expect various magical tests to return more abstract results than numbers or words. Things like colours, sounds and shapes which a healers needs to interoperate.

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Like a PH test. It doesn't give you a number, it instead gives you a colour which you must compare on a known scale.

 

I would rather it returns words, rather than abstract. For the most part, I view spells and wand magic to be designed - somebody creates a spell for a specific thing. Maybe it has side effects or other uses, but the spell has been designed to be used by healers.

Think of a digital thermometer. It measures the change in conductivity of a resistor, and then cross checks the result to determine the temperature, which is displayed to the user. It wouldn't be useless if it displayed the conductivity, but it would require extra knowledge from the user, and doesn't gain anything from doing it this way.
It's the same with drug testing kits in airports. Whilst it could show a spectroscopy curve of the weights of things found, instead it flashes up a message of "HEROIN", "THC", or "CLEAN". It took effort to add this step to the computer, but making security look at the graph and try to figure it out themselves doesn't gain anything.


Side effect wise, I wouldn't mind abstract results. Maybe a certain jinx causes you to bleed through your skin. It turns out that people with certain vitamin/mineral deficiencies bleed different colours because of how the spell reacts with your blood, but the spell wasn't originally designed to check for those sorts of things. It just happens that if you're low on iron, then the blood that leaks out happens to be a bit greener.

On the other hand, if magic is 'discovered', rather than created, then I don't have any issue with the results from magical tests being really annoying.

You could also just have that the people who invent spells are massive dicks, but by itself that doesn't add much to the story.

 

Well, when I think abstract I think Dumbledore's thingamajigs he used to "diagnose" Harry's vision. The results returned were very abstract.

 

To clarify what I meant by tests, an example: make the patient stand on one leg with a frog on their head on the day before the full moon. If their big toe explodes then they have a problem with their spleen.

 

I think my biggest gripe with fanon is that magic can cure everything nonsense. We already know that, assuming what was shown in the movies is canon, that there are plenty of times when Harry, Ron and Hermione are shown with cuts and bandages.

As for suffering normal birth defects and what not I would assume they are no different from muggles. I base this on the simple fact that witches and wizards wear glasses and hence do not appear to know about corrective eye surgery or are unable to do such with spells and potions. Some are born with bad eye sight. Keep in mind that as such facts are not pertinent to the story they were more or less whitewashed in the HP world.

A healer would have to learn\know a plethora of diagnostic spells it would seem. They would note the symptoms and from that form a list of the possible problems\injuries and then perhaps use specific spells to determine exactly what it is. In short it wouldn't be much different than what muggle doctors do now.

 

In DH Molly says that if something has been cursed off with dark magic it can't be healed. So in everyone's head canon does that mean that if any part of the body is lost do to some other accident not due to dark magic and that it isn't instantly fatal can just be put back together again?

 

E.g. Splicing vs whatever happened to Moody? Splicing always seemed to be regarded as nbd, healing wise. Do they feel pain from having body parts in two different locations, like a sudden amputation? Or is it like parts of oneself just exist in two different points in space and it's just a matter of reconnecting them?

 

In OoTP Susan Bones splinches her leg off, but she gets it back later. I don't think it's much of a big deal, but it would still be something that should be seen by a professional (unlike Ron and his arm in tDH). Probably comparable to a sprained muscle or something. There's also mention from Arthur Weasley about two wizards who left pieces of themselves behind for muggles to see, and complains about the paperwork.

I don't know about how much pain it causes. I don't think it's as sensitive as it being ripped out of your body (otherwise Susan might well have died. As would the two wizards), but I don't it's completely painless. Even if the pain might be caused by interacting with the splinched area, rather than the splinching itself.

 

I mean if say a body part is destroyed like say an eye can it be regrown or healed as long as the injury wasn't a result of dark magic. I always assumed Mad Eye's scarring was all due to dark magic inflicted wounds.

 

One of the key factors of the Wizarding World is its uniqueness. We see things like the Marauder's Map, the Weasley's clocks (the one with 'time for tea' and 'you're late', and the 'travelling' and 'in mortal peril'), Dumbledore's knick-knacks, the flying car with invisibility booster, the Hand of Glory, the Sorting Hat, and so forth that seem to be one-of-a-kind as far as we know. Sometimes these can have unique and unanticipated effects, like the car gaining sentience.

We see Fred and George inventing and creating all sorts of items that they then sell to the public. They are both an industry and commercial business. Ollivanders' works the same way. The Nimbus broom company could merely be a single family of four. There doesn't appear to be many mass producers, most of the items being produced by a small number of people.

We also see new spells and potions. Snape in his teenage years made many alterations and improvements to potions using slightly different ingredients and steps. Hermione may or may not have invented the Four Point spell, and the Hogwarts library is chock full of books from various centuries that have obscure or forgotten spells.

My point is that with all of the (presumably) thousands of jinxes, countless ways of blowing up countless types of potions, strange accidental buffaloes that occur by mispronouncing a spell, and cursed and enchanted items created by hundreds of different wizards of varying levels of competency, I would imagine that rather than the Muggle doctor approach of relying on the extensive research already done to categorize diseases based off of their symptoms and following the treatment guidelines, Healers must instead discover what unique illness or curse is affecting their patient.