This is a great post about magical healing in fantasy settings. If you really think about it magical healing is incredible scary in context. It’s great and keeps casualties down, but man that stuff is scary:
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The latter part reminds me of what happened to Paul Edgecomb and the mouse from Green Mile. Was the healing really a blessing? In the same vein there is also the idea of magically transferring the injuries from one person and giving it to another. That would be terrifying power in the wrong hands.
I’m quite fascinated by the premise of healing in Maria Snyder’s Healer series. Healers in her world heal by taking on injuries or illness to themselves. They heal faster than normal people, but if they heal a broken arm, their own arm will break. They carry scars with pride, knowing that they saved others from the pain of it. And a strong injury or illness can still kill a healer, as they still have to assume it to heal it. And healing faster still doesn’t make you immune to death by blood loss, or a fever cooking your brain.
The Adventures in Brad by Tao Wong, has the premise that too much magical healing will cause tumors, inability to heal, and possible death. Add to that that Healers are severely lacking in numbers…
One of the stories I’ve been working on takes advantage of this.
The main character is a powerful healer, very rare. But he’s also a slave owned by a master who fights gladiators.
And the healer’s mind starts to break when he’s forced to heal the same people from the brink of death over and over, a dozen times in the same day just so they are forced to keep fighting and keep getting critically wounded, getting almost no rest or reprieve. The master’s goal is to fight them so hard that they improve dramatically.
However, when the master hands over the girl he secretly loves to be healed and she’s already too far gone to be saved, the healer snaps.
It’s hard to stop someone who can heal themselves almost immediately. The healer spends the next several days torturing his master by keeping him at the edge of death but never letting him die.
I didn’t say it was a happy story,