Woodcut by unknown artist, 1720. Credit: Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0)
I like the small things in fantasy, by which I mean I like germs and figuring out if the characters know about them. People in the real world didn’t know about germs for a long time, either (though many people put forth theories about spores, contagions, and small bodies and how to prevent their spread). Our previous theories and treatments made sense given what we could observe, and many fantasies draw from the centuries before we put names to the things that cause and spread illness.
There’s a terrifying tinge of dramatic irony to injuries in fantasy, especially when the reader knows the limits of the world’s medicine and magic. It is easy to cast aside the scientific history of a fantasy world when the focus of the story isn’t medical in nature, but good books still hint at their world’s medical knowledge. This part of world building can be so small that it’s nearly imperceptible, but as in medi