2118. Muggleborn alumni becoming ER nurses, confusing doctors by healing trauma wounds while no one is looking.
[An uninvited and ridiculously lengthy interjection from Alex:
This whole topic upsets me so much. St Mungo’s has five departments (not including the visitors’ tearoom and hospital shop. All of these departments deal with magic-related injuries, such as ‘Spell Damage’ and ‘
Magical Bugs and Diseases’, but there’s ostensibly no department to heal injuries which also infect muggles, such as a broken leg or heart disease.
This leaves us with one of two conclusions:
Firstly, it is possible that wizards (including witches –
honestly I think using just the term wizards is somewhat sexist but…. It’s
shorter) use the muggle services provided for these injuries. But this seems
unlikely, given their complete inability to function within the muggle world –
for example, we see at the quidditch world cup that many can’t even wear
clothing which doesn’t stand out, and they have no understanding of the muggle
currency. So it’s difficult to believe that families like the Malfoys and
Weasleys are able to utilize these services without raising some serious
questions.
Secondly, it’s possible that fixing these problems is really
easy for wizards, through the use of potions like Skele-gro, that these
problems present so little an issue that there’s no need for a department to cure
them. (Caveat: it seems likely that St Mungo’s is the only wizarding hospital, while
it is possible that there’s another building which heals these problems it’s
never mentioned so seems quite improbable.) For context, this means that
*everything the NHS deals with* (or whatever the equivalent healthcare system
is in the rest of the world), from terminal illnesses like cancer to the aftermath
of severe car accidents, is so easy for Healers to fix that it never gets to
them because it can be fixed at home.
And why does this upset me so much? Because it seems likely
that wizards can quickly and effortlessly fix the issues which plague (no pun
intended) muggles. It would be so easy to help so many people! On an
egalitarian basis, that’s clearly the right thing to do – forget working for
the ministry like 80% of wizards seem to do, why isn’t there a group working healing
people at a ridiculously fast rate?
But this is an issue which doesn’t just apply to healing. I
want to know why wizards don’t spend their time helping Muggles in general.
While I was happy to accept, as the seven-year old I was when I first read ‘The
Philosopher’s Stone’, that it would cause too much fuss to show muggles magic, Hogwarts
alumni could be apparating to the refugee camps crowded across Greece and
Turkey and filling bottles with clean water in *literally seconds*. For *free*.
This wouldn’t even require revealing magic! While many of the problems facing
the world are complex matters, many more are as simple as requiring water,
shelter, or access to basic hygiene. It requires selfishness to an extreme
degree to refuse this, both in our own non-magical society but especially
within the wizarding world.
I’m very interested to hear what everyone else thinks about
this, so please do reply with your own opinion.
PS I’m very sorry to the person whose submission I hijacked. This wasn’t addressed at your headcanon, more at the absence of this in canon. You’re great, I hope you have a lovely day!]
