PTNS-301 Lessons

Welcome to your Third Year of Potions. Your Third Year, at least for this course, is a year of growth. You are no longer new to the school and my expectations are significantly higher for you than they have been the past two years. This means complete sentences along with proper grammar when doing your homework this term. Some essays will be mandatory and are required for you to get to Fourth Year and beyond in this class. You will see the introduction of the Potions Thesis project for those who wish to complete it for Years Three through Seven. Also, your brewing will get more precise, delicate, and complicated as we progress through the year. Make sure you are reading the instructions carefully, taking thorough notes, and asking any questions that should arise. 

Moving on, the focus of this term will be medicinal potions and healing. This is not only an important topic for any aspiring potioneer, but also useful for those of you that wish to continue on into healing and the healing arts as a career path. Throughout the course, we will progress in terms of severity, from minor cuts, bruises and injuries to more life-threatening disasters, illnesses and poisoning. We will also discuss both non-magical injuries - such as those caused in an accident or by contracting a typical disease - as well as magical ones that call for magical solutions - such as what potions might be applicable in the event of poisoning, a magical backfire or other accidental or intentional harm.

In addition, we will learn the recipe of one important healing potion each class from Lesson Three onwards, starting with a Bruise Removal Paste and ending with a Cure for Common Poisons. While I would love to teach you more in the course of the next nine classes, for the sake of length in the lessons, additional learning will be somewhat supplementary - you can find many recipes in Mama Val's Quick Remedies. You will learn far more should you choose to pursue a career as a healer, but these are two of the more common recipes you may need even when considering home-brewing remedies.

Introduction to Healing
During the final lesson of Year Two, we discussed Egyptian use of potions and magical remedies. Given their extensive knowledge of medical maladies, it should be of little surprise that, though potioneering was not as popular as one may expect, it was still the place to be should you have fallen ill in the ancient world. Magical and non-magical healers alike displayed more knowledge than many cultures up until the most recent, and unfortunately, many of that knowledge died with them, owing to the secretive nature of the ancient Egyptians. The curse-breakers are working not only to discover the secrets of ancient charms and enchantments, but also their sophisticated healing practices, which included many spells and potions, as well as Muggle practices.

Moving into the Western tradition of medicine, one of the most well-known names is that of Hippocrates of Kos, a Greek physician from the 5th Century BCE. Hippocrates is credited as one of the first people in the ancient world to publicly state that he felt diseases and other maladies were naturally caused, rather than being a result of divine intervention and malevolence. This assertion has often earned him the title of the father of Western medicine. His outspokenness in this regard and his opposition to the prevailing Greek belief in supernatural and divine causes for misfortune and malady earned him a twenty year prison sentence, as this belief contradicted the upheld beliefs of those Greeks who held political power at the time.

However, Hippocrates continued with his work, and he even wrote additional books and other publications discussing medical theory while he was imprisoned. Undaunted even following such a long prison sentence, Hippocrates and his students continued to perform experiments following his release in order to prove that illness and their resulting symptoms had natural causes, and to encourage physicians to set their primary goal as rebalancing the body’s functions and restoring it to proper order rather than combating negative energies or deities intent on harming the patient.

The corpus of Hippocrates and his students consists of approximately seventy works in total from that time period; however, the most famous work to emerge during Hippocrates’ lifetime is the Hippocratic Oath. Nearly half of the Muggle healers in the United Kingdom and about 53% of modern magical healers still swear some version of this oath along with their other Ministry-required healing oaths. Modern versions vary slightly, depending on the source, but a fairly common one can be found at a Muggle institution in the United States, Johns Hopkins. In this oath, the healer swears to fulfill bioethical obligations to the best of his or her ability and judgment. It is a secular oath, without recollection of the traditional one, which began with the invocation, “I swear by Apollo, the healer, Asclepius, Hygeia, and Panacea, and I take witness to all the gods, and all the goddesses,” and so continues.

It is perhaps interesting to note that, despite his opposition to blaming afflictions on the gods, Hippocrates and his followers were content to pen an oath in which a healer does swear by divinities that supposedly interfered and assisted in healing. This illustrates the pervasiveness of religion in ancient Greek life, and indeed in many ancient cultures, although that is not to say we do not see similar religious attribution said in passing even in contemporary practices.

One medical contribution attributed to Hippocrates that influenced the philosophy of medicine for over two thousand years is the concept of humorism. Although it likely had its earliest roots in Mesopotamia or ancient Egypt, it gained popularity in Classical Greece. Humorism is a medical theory that attributes particular afflictions or disorders to an imbalance of fluids known as humors. The medieval (and much later!) practice of bleeding to alleviate an ill patient derived from this theory, which stated that too much or too little of the humors - namely, blood or bile in the case of bleeding - could cause adverse reactions in a human’s constitution. Each of the four humors - blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm - is associated with an element, a season, an organ, as well as other factors, such as personality characteristics. These characteristics continued to be popular as a kind of early “personality type” assessment. While the ancient Greeks broke down the personality even further - even so far as the type of dreams and metabolic inclinations a person had - the below table illustrates a later general understanding of the humors:

Humorism in Shakespearean Cosmology
This interest in balancing the humors continued in the healing world through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. During this time period, the International Statute of Secrecy also came into existence. Although this statute prevented witches and wizards from any collaboration with non-magical healers, this complete separation from the dangers of Muggle and magical interaction also freed many potioneers to experiment in a more dramatic fashion, and to work towards more strictly magical remedies for illnesses and ailments. While much scientific learning in the non-magical world faltered and occasionally regressed with the rise of Christianity in Western philosophy, the magical community’s knowledge of ingredients, charms and potions increased exponentially during this time. Many of the most common recipes we still use in potioneering came from the exploration of potions during this time period, particularly in Vienna, London, Athens and Damascus. There are many instances where common potions ingredients do reflect these characteristics, and it is thought that some of the theory behind humorism may have been derived from the properties of common magical ingredients used in potions at that time. For example, black bile is associated with a quiet, analytical and even melancholic disposition. Armadillo bile is an ingredient commonly used in Wit-Sharpening Potion as well as other concoctions that are intended to improve focus and analytical intelligence. Dragon heartstrings, a common core for wands, are also known to produce the most flamboyant wands as well, while blood and the heart are associated in humorism with playfulness, an outgoing nature and courage.

One of the most well-known potioneers of this era is Zygmunt Budge, the sixteenth century potioneer who authored a work simply titled Book of Potions. Within these pages, Budge details his perfected recipes for many potions that are still well-known today, including the Cure for Boils, which was the very first potion you brewed in this class! Despite his overbearing and oft pompous nature, Budge’s research of ingredients and potions did the healing world a tremendous service. If you can get your hands on a copy of the Book of Potions, I highly recommend giving it a read.

Of course, the most famous healer in Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was Saint Mungo Bonham, who was the founder of St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries; not to be confused with the Muggle called St. Mungo, who lived in the sixth century and remains patron saint of Glasgow. Although smaller private clinics and hospitals existed in Britain prior to St. Mungo’s opening in the early seventeenth century, it was the first large, centralized magical hospital in the United Kingdom. St. Mungo was a prominent healer and experimental healing potioneer in London. He was known for his work traveling out to more remote locations in order to provide assistance and healing to those who were too infirm or sick to travel to London to seek knowledgeable help. This work with the resourceless and impoverished caused Bonham to realize that having a single institution, such as St. Mungo’s Hospital, overseen by the Ministry would afford witches and wizards of all backgrounds dependable care throughout the duration of their lives.

It was not quite that easy to gain Ministry acceptance of such a large structure at that time, however. Remember that Bonham was working fewer than one hundred years before the Statute was put into place: a large, centralized magical entity such as St. Mungo’s caused a bit of anxiety and concern among the Ministry. Initially, rather than being located in London proper, as it is now, it was housed on the far outskirts of the city. Bonham galvanized the healing community, however, and was able to attract some of the most talented healers in the country to come work for the hospital. Integrity and accountability were core values that St. Mungo stressed to his healers. His goal, he often said, was to have a facility that provided the same quality care for every magical injury or malady, no matter how small or large. The quality of healers was vital as well: in smaller clinics, if one’s healer became unavailable, a patient was often simply out of luck until the healer returned, unless the patient sought another carer. St. Mungo’s Hospital afforded patients the opportunity to have a continuum of high quality, Ministry-approved care, as well as more thorough monitoring throughout the duration of an illness or injury.

In the early nineteenth century, the Ministry approved a request for the hospital to move a bit further into the city so as to provide easier access to the magical residents of London as well as make transportation easier for those who traveled from outside the city to seek care. St. Mungo’s Hospital then moved into London proper, and was located in an old Muggle government building for a little under one hundred years. In 1903, St. Mungo’s Hospital moved one final time to the abandoned warehouse in which it currently resides. The hospital boasts thorough care across the spectrum of magical maladies, including Creature-Induced Injuries, Artifact Mishaps, Spell Damage including backfiring, Potion and Plant Poisoning, and Magical Illnesses.

Despite advances on the practical side of healing during St. Mungo’s rise within the UK, the more theoretical and non-magical aspects of healing have been sometimes overlooked. Of the disciplines involving potions, however, healing is one of the practices that relies most heavily on non-magical sciences, particularly biology and chemistry. St. Mungo himself recognized the importance of understanding how magical humans and non-humans function on a biological level, and thus the symbol of St. Mungo’s is a wand and a bone crossed so as to remind healers of the importance of attending to the non-magical physical needs of patients as well as the physical. Remember that, although we are magical, we are still susceptible to colds, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and other maladies that afflict Muggles as well. To be a well-rounded healer, it is vital to understand all those processes within the body and to prescribe magical and non-magical remedies as appropriate.

Of course, despite all of the advances that have been made in potions, there is still a good deal of research being done, as we have yet to cure all maladies, both magical and non-magical. While complex theoretical work is done in locations such as Vienna, most research in England is still conducted through more traditional methods of trial and error. I attend yearly conferences around the world in order to keep up with the many advancements in potions. Multiple papers and dissertations are published each decade discussing theory, ingredients and new techniques. It’s a continuous cycle of evolving ideas and fantastic new remedies.

For this week, as well as the quiz, you will be researching one healer from the past, be they magical or non-magical. Next week, we will be doing a thorough overview of ingredients that should be kept in your potions cabinet, be they brewable ingredients or ones that you may simply swallow to alleviate discomfort and other symptoms. It is long and quite detailed so I implore you all to take good notes and bring extra parchment.

Dismissed.

Original lesson written by Professor Lucrezia Batyaeva
Image credits via Wikimedia Commons and here