The Plague Doctor

There’s really no denial in the advancement of medicine. Medicine comes with technology, and technology won’t stop moving as long as humans are around to keep it going.

As medicine advances, its old ways seem primitive, and are left behind by the majority of society. Take for example the leeches. They were used because humans thought there was an imbalance in the amount of blood inside you. So doctors came to the natural conclusion, that tiny little vampire fish would do just the trick to solve your illness. The leeches were used to make careful incisions into your body to suck out the excess blood, by placing them on the any of the patient’s limbs, letting it sit there and wiggle for about 20-30 seconds.

You can see why this never caught on.

Leeches probably caused more than they solved, with disease and possible infection from their bite. Then there was also cutting off a spot caused by the black plague with a red hot knife, sticking needles in your body to balance mental health, smashing open your head to release demons, and thinking nice pretty flowers would keep you safe from deadly sicknesses.

Medicine will never stop marching towards the finish line, but it will never ever get there. People will always look back and laugh at how we did things, thinking that maybe shooting billions of deadly lasers at someone to kill a few cells isn’t the brightest idea we had.

Now, for just a second, I want you to take in all of the advancements we’ve made, to really take in how far we’ve come from our ape-like ancestors, and to let that sink in. We’ve truly come far from our origins as the primitive creatures that used straws to weed out the termites in their mounds, to the sophisticated humans we are now. But what if we could have done all of this from the start? What if we could have done everything that took us almost 2 million years in the blink of an eye.

You’re probably wondering “Wait a minute, how the hell are we going to do all of that instantly? It’s not like we have magic.”

But what if we did have magic? What if we had the ability to just tell the universe what we wanted to do, and it would just do it. What if we could do amazing things without having to do any of the hard work? What if we could change the world just like that?

That’s where the inspiration for writing this came from, as well as the game DND. In the game, there are different classes and races you can play, but all that I want to focus on are the sorcerers. Sorcerers are people who gain their magic naturally, either from a magical ancestry or something mixing in with their blood. Nonetheless, they have magical abilities at birth, which grow stronger as they age. The characters in my world could all be classified as sorcerers, considering that they have their arcane abilities naturally. But what really got me thinking is one of the spells in the sorcerer’s spell list: True resurrection, a spell associated with true goodness and divine intervention, is a spell in the necromancy domain, a school linked to evil and death.

But necromancy is really just a school that deals with the forces of life and death, which can be good or bad, it just depends on how you use it. That’s what Rowen is: A boy with the powers of evil, death, and destruction, who wants nothing more than to be a doctor.

He is The Plague Doctor.