While most of the doctors in science fiction I've seen tend to have a basis in reality — Simon Tam has strong ethics but his sense of sacrifice on behalf of his sister is very believable, and [the crankiness from Star Trek is practically legendary](https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-trek-doctors-ranked-by-crankiness/) — when you add magic to the mix, healers suddenly become very much of a type. In most stories where medical care plays a role, the character of the healer is typically a nurturing bleeding heart type, typically feminine and soft hearted. In the Black Jewels Trilogy, healers are a literal caste innately requiring protection from themselves, their own extreme impulse to give everything for others an enormous risk to their health and wellness. In what feels like most fantasy stories I come across, the second someone's magic revolves around healing, you can bet that they're going to need a strong man to stop them from giving too much of themselves in their healing. It's such a common trope that the character archetype "the healer" in video games like World of Warcraft and League of Legends are more often than not female; if you don't believe me here's the [relevant page on TV Tropes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheMedic). But in reality, most doctors and nurses are not self-sacrificing to the point of killing themselves. Although modern doctors do have punishing schedules, this isn't inherent to the profession from a historical sense, and it doesn't explain the trope. Most of the medics and doctors I know in real life are adrenaline junkies or brilliant people driven to make a difference. From a historical perspective, I have no reason to believe that a "gift" for healing ever brought with it this sort of overabundance of a giving instinct, and from what I know of the early history of doctors, the darker impulses of that profession seem to have inspired a more Dr. Frankenstein approach. Many early folks in the medical field were first and foremost scientists. A big goal of mine with my writing is to have my fantasy stories be more informed by actual history than memetic impressions of history, so ever since I wrote [Embaphium](https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/embaphium/) %% ( [[2021-07-28 Embaphium (DRAFT)]] ) %% I've been collecting information about ancient doctors. In the Afterword for [Embaphium](https://newsletter.eleanorkonik.com/embaphium/) %% ( [[2021-07-28 Embaphium (DRAFT)]] ) %% I talked about how ancient priests often served as healers, but I didn't discuss any particular ancient priestess-healers in particular. Turns out, though, that we do know some things about individual Egyptian doctors; there's actually an apocryphal tale about an Athenian woman studying medicine in Alexandria and then returning home, disguised as a man, to practice medicine. Turns out Egypt had a bunch of high-ranking women priests; we have records indicating that a woman named Peseshet served as the "lady director of lady physicians." Whether she herself was a physician is open to debate, but unlike poor apocryphal Agnodice we have pretty good evidence Peseshet existed, in the form of a stele found in a tomb that may have belonged to her son. According to the stele, one of her duties was to look after the pharaoh's mother's funerary priests. What I find most interesting isn't the fact of her gender, though, as the fact that ancient Egypt had a tightly regulated medical field, with a strict hierarchy and education system. The Western tradition — especially the Classicists — sometimes acts like medicine was invented by the Greeks, but if anything that's just where our particular set of records originates; we have records of highly regimented medical training programs from over four thousand years ago. Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen are the most well known Classical medical experts. Galen gets a bad rep because he's the guy that popularized the idea of the four humors, but from what I can tell, it's undeserved. The son of a wealthy architect, his father apparently saw the god of healing in a dream, and the god said Galen should be a doctor. So of course Galen spent about a decade travelling around and studying medicine with various experts, then did what feels almost like a working apprenticeship stint treating injured gladiators. This was, it's important to note, very unusual; he wound up with what was almost certainly an exceptionally excellent understanding of human anatomy compared to his peers. This pissed off his peers, and he was run out of Rome. Later he was summoned back by the emperor to help deal with the plague, and became pretty famous; he had followers, Marcus Aurelius thought really highly of him, and he served as court physician for Commodus for many years. During his life, he wrote a _lot_ — books, letters, you name it. But mostly, it seems, he was driven by a very genuine desire to learn about medicine and share his knowledge, even at risk to himself. Kuria shares _that_ impulse, so in a way, she's not so far off from the self-sacrificing trope of the fantasy healer after all.