Cure Disease; The Impact

Depends on setting.

>>55401362
How frequently can they cure disease, and what do they need/want to do it?

>>55401362
the lowest cure disease spell in 5e is "lesser restoration", a 2nd level spell, which instantly rules out most clerics, limiting the actual healing to maybe 1 a day per cleric
this wont save their own host, let alone the city


however, a paladin gets maybe 1 or 2 cure disease with lay on hands, 3 or 4 if he is good
this allows some relief to the city, but it doesnt keep the disease away, and a paladin will need to spend one use on himself to prevent him from dying, so this will help but not in the amount needed

High Fantasy World. They can do this 1 to 3 times a day. But they are not immune themselves. Half of the Gods they serve care about the afflicted, but the other half do not. Plague doctors, and conventional healers, exist but only perform as much as their real-life counterparts did.

Those that don't care may charge money or do it to promote the interests they serve. The others are altruistic and benevolent.

>>55401469
Might lead to an unusually healthy population, but they're still helpless against large outbreaks. Really depends on how good their detection is. Perhaps if they're willing to do several check ups a day they could prevent outbreaks from happening in the first place

If you have easy access to Cure Disease (and Cure Wounds, and Cure Poison [don't forget about things affecting preindustrial societies like ergot poisoning]), your entire population is going to start living longer. Long enough that many people can reasonably expect to contract cancer. And the closest magic can come to treating cancer, is using Cure Wounds on a patient you just cut open in a desperate attempt to cut out all of their tumors.

So, as a farmer, what do you do when you suddenly start seeing elderly people, and those elderly people suddenly start being afflicted by an illness that clerics cannot or will not treat?

>>55401362

Lesser Restoration doesn't provide immunity, and can't be used often enough to provide a population with herd immunity, so anything at scale wouldn't be stopped. People would be reinfected unless they have the luxury to sequester themselves.

I'd guess the role of clerics during an outbreak would be trying to do damage control (depending hugely on that society's understanding of disease) while keeping themselves and any authority figures reasonably healthy. Purifying food and water would be useful, too, if they identify contaminated food as the source.

>>55401463
>a paladin will need to spend one use on himself to prevent him from dying

It's not that simple.

Sure, the paladin is likely to be exposed and reinfected the same day. But then the disease needs to multiply within his body before there is enough of it in his body to cause him harm again*. Though that duration might be reduced by the damage the previous round of that disease did (unless that is also healed through magic). I doubt that anyone will need to be treated daily.

Then there is the bodies natural immune system. I have no idea if the progress towards producing antibodies from the first exposure to the disease will carry over to the second exposure.

It might be a case where it's possible to keep treating someone whenever the symptoms show up until they stop showing up because the person is now immune to that disease.


*Incubation periods vary with diseases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubation_period#Examples_for_human

>>55401362

File: blackdeath_main.jpg.png (771KB, 705x599px) Image search: [Google]

771KB, 705x599px

Assuming we're talking about a Pathfinder/D&D kinda setting with "normal" levels of magical ability, it wouldn't make much of a difference at all.

Even assuming a few dozen Clerics capable of curing disease in a city of 10,000 (which is generous), you're still just talking about a few dozen. Most of those Clerics are going to be capable of casting only 1 or 2 remove disease spells in a day. In the meantime, depending on the plague's infection vectors, you may be looking /several/ dozen people exposed to a disease during each day, at minimum.

The only population that having Clerics around is going to make a difference for in a plague scenario are the upper classes. You can be assured that anyone with the money to do so is going to secure the majority of that finite supply of daily Remove Disease spells. The average group of clerics is going to be all too willing to rationalize this. "Oh well we can't run a temple on charity alone, this is better in the long term." or "it's really most important we keep this important members of society healthy for the greater good of the city in these trying times," sorta stuff. Depending on how blatant this class division is in access to curative magics, it may cause all kinds of social problems in plague-times.

And then there are other mechanics. If removing disease requires some sort of caster level check or something to successfully cast, statistically a few Clerics are going to fail those rolls on any given day. And in a fantasy world, the plague itself may have any number of unnatural means of spreading through the population that even a couple hundred clerics wouldn't be able to keep up with.

So other than potentially insulating the upper classes better than in reality, I don't think divine disease removal would really have any meaningful effect against a full-blown plague. If anything, it may very well HARM morale in the city to see such limited resources possibly being exploited for only an advantaged minority.

Lots of magic healing would give a fantasy world something similar to real life today, where we artificially prolong the lives of our non contributors and end up with hordes of crippled and aged that consume resources. Eventually the clerics will either need to stop using healing resources on them or will end up squandering the majority of their resources on the weak and feeble. Of course, once a population gets used to living 90+ years off the cleric spells, if the clerics try to withdraw their support there might be massive social backlash.

Honestly, I'd think that the resurrection spells would be a bigger problem. Especially if you're not in a high magic setting and there are wealthy fuckers who can just buy them willy nilly.

>>55401463
Paladins are immune to non-magical diseases, tho

It'd mean fuck all for the health of the average citizen due to limited access but probably a lot would change in terms of national stability. Fewer monarchs and lords would be dying young meaning you'd have fewer shifts in the political landscape. Matching with real world declines in birth rate correlating with reduced infant mortality probably fewer heirs would have sibling spares reducing the number of civil wars a given land would suffer in the long term.