Editing Magipunk:Magic (section)

=== Medicine ===

As has been previously noted, magic can not create tissue or blood, nor bring a person back to life. However, despite this, magic is very useful for healthcare! Magic can knit tissue back together, support life in the absense of the normal necessities thereof, prevent decay, and destroy disease. 

Medical magic is a very specialized subfield or sorcery, and an intellectually demanding one. Most people, even most sorcerers, are not competent to perform even the simplest medical magical tasks, and specialist doctor-sorcerers are in high demand, and can command excellent prices. Because of this, high-quality healthcare is mostly the province of the rich. Still, a lower-class family may be able to work up the price of a single good disease-cure or the like, given time and prudence, and the life expectancy of the general populace has been inching slowly upwards in recent years. 

Only the Elves have mastered the process of truly stopping aging, through a complex set of interrelated systems involving having modified their own race on a permenant level, and creating symbiotic plants whose fruits they must eat regularly. Human medical magic still can not hold off death indefinitely. Most medical magic puts a certain general strain onto the systems of the patient, strain that a young person's body can bear without any problems but which tends to cause future health problems in the old. Still, the very rich can reasonably expect to see well past their 80th year, and, with some luck, past their 100th. 

Note that anti-agathic medical magic is very different from necromancy. Necromancers allow tissue to die, then prevent it from rotting and reanimate it. True anti-agathic magic prevents death in the first place. The techniques and spells used for each discipline are totally different.