GWhite wrote:
Slamlander wrote:
drunk wrote:
Slamlander wrote:
normalphil wrote:
Would half-elf resistance keep a person from being magically healed from consumption? If so, could be that. Asthma is more of a wheezing gasping for breath that isn't there than full blown chest-spasm that creeps up on you then floors you.
Nah, Tuberculosis isn't due to a genetic fault. Antibiotics puts paid to that bug fairly nicely. I would guess something on the order of asthma or something similar.
I think the point was that they don't have antibiotics to put pay that bug, and therefore should someone get it the normal cure would probably be magic. Half elves being genetically resistant to magic could make the disease uncureable. Assuming, of course, that they don't have antibiotics for it.
Who says they don't? Mixing up batches of herbs is very consistant with healing magic. I would wager that mages would come up with antibiotics even quicker than we did. After all, most antibiotics are only powdered mold, nothing high-tech there.
Not that simple at all, you need to culture the stuff in large quantities and then purify it.
Reason #5006 why magic sucks, it prevents the development of tech that anyone can use.
Actually, it is. Pharmacies use their processes for a multiple of reasons but the main one is to obfuscate the recipe of the drug itself. They can also control purity, and they can do mass volume. For a pure antibiotic, you can make it yourself and you don't even have to have a petri dish. Purity and quality suffers but not much and the process isn't much different than making sour-dough bread, as long as you don't need millions of measured doses.
Check out Foxglove and Digitalis, also Williow Bark and Asprin. The trick with Penicillin is to get the right mold but that's the problem with sour-dough bread as well. Beer brewers go through much the same process. Geuze, a Belgian beer, depends for its flavor, on a particular mold that only grows in a certain European valley (BTW, try it, it's really good beer, tastes a little sour though).
We've been making drugs for over three thousand years, it's low-tech, even if we have shiney high-tech toys now to help us, it's still low-tech. Herbalists knew the benefits of digitalin, found in the foxglove plant, for heart patients, since the Roman days, at least.
It is possible that even our own world's Romans used some antibiotica applied via moldy cheese. However, the minor detail of the Dark Ages obscures the record there.