As previously detailed, the natural lifespan of the Radiant Wings was enhanced above baseline humanity by virtue of Ällora's gift of a strengthened spirit link. In spite of this, they were still subject to age and its posse of infirmities, and it is estimated that 1200 years was the maximum biological limit on their earthly time. Naturally, the Radiant rebelled against this limit, intervening with their magic to prop up their degenerating physiques.
The magic system of Eldawn is such that energy within a person's body normally cannot be manipulated by another user's will. The control that someone has over magic in the area diminishes with distance from the body, but within the confines of the skin itself, absolute control is normally maintained. This natural barrier can be circumvented in a number of ways, and one of those ways is when an individual willingly allows it to drop for another trusted individual to enter. In this state, another person can observe and alter the movement of energy within the exposed individual's body. Of course someone with magical senses is able to detect the energy pathways and structure of their own body with practice and refined technique.
Among the Radiant Wings, Älloran magic would allow them to detect electrical signals within the body; perhaps most directly, the pulses of neural signaling. The brain would be a perpetual cluster of electrical activity, but it would take an experienced individual to distinguish the pathways within it. So somewhat amusingly, the Radiant may have had a better understanding of nervous control and systems before any other part of the body.
Mastery of other wavelengths of light and magnetism would eventually have allowed the Radiant Wings to perceive much of the internal workings of the physical body, just as we have x-rays and magnetic resonance imaging today.
Medicine would only have come be an area of interest as the eldest individuals of the Radiant started to notice their declining health. I'm placing this at a rough estimate of 850 AE, since their lifespans are about 1200 years. The signs would be slight at first; shortness of breath, lethargy, diminished strength. Eventually this would get to the point where a person's capability was noticeably affected. I do not wish to have infectious disease and horrific conditions such as cancer enter the picture just yet. The world of Eldawn cannot fall so far in its youth.
It would not have taken much thinking to design magically enhanced mechanisms to assume some of the physical demands of the body. These would be automatically powered rather than manually driven; manually directed manual machines would be just as taxing, defeating the purpose entirely. After these reactive measures, there were two resulting schools of thought. The first was to find ways of restoring the body to its original state. They focused on trying to determine the body's pathophysiology and correct whatever was faltering. Once the root cause of the problem was elucidated, it would be corrected by surgical intervention if it was structural. The fields of biochemistry and genetics remain rather undeveloped compared to our own, at least in Radiant Wings cities, as a result, pharmaceuticals and drugs are not viewed as the most promising option.
Surgery could be performed by another once an individual's natural barrier was lowered. With delicate control, an atherosclerotic vessel could be unclogged, calculi disintegrated or thrombi dissolved. Anesthetic effects would be easily achieved by temporarily disabling the electrochemical signals of the sensory neurons in the area.
The other approach would be quite different; its proponents preferred instead to find better and more efficient ways of magical integration. Feeble muscles would be augmented by contractile fibres that responded to the same motor impulses just as organic muscle would. The body would gradually be replaced by reliable magically supported technologies. The users of this sort of treatment would gradually turn away from biological substance, becoming more of hybrid creatures of magical structures and a withering anatomy. One thing that could not however, be replaced was the brain. Perhaps due to its complexity, and partly due to beliefs that the electrically active brain housed the anchor for the spirit link, the brain remained sanctified long beyond any other part of the body.
Eventually the integrative approach won out over the restorative approach. The restorative approach only seemed to target superficial symptoms, but not the underlying illness. The body continued to malfunction, and in greater severity, even after repeated surgical intervention. It was deemed inferior to the integrative approach that made better long term economies. The search for underlying causes was abandoned as too tedious and also due to the fact that a working alternative was so apparent.
The integrative approach eventually bore a more radical school of thought, which I have already mentioned in 'Societal Allegory : The Radiant Wings - Agriculture and Gastronomy', namely, the school of Postcorporism. Subscribers to this view believed that the body could be all but entirely done away with. Living well into the time of Connectivity, existence could be moved to digital expression and manifestation. The Postcoporists began to integrate their neural circuitry into the computers around them. The brain took information in directly from the virtual world around it, the process was dubbed abstraction. Those who had undergone it had their physical bodies kept in a stasis, while their mental selves wandered swiftly through datastreams and networks, exploring, creating, dreaming, interacting. If they so wished, idealised holographic projections could manifest themselves in the buildings and halls of Elenis and Alanis. The troublesome body was redundant, life could be just as fulfilling without it.
So medicine moves from being a unsettling necessity, to a mix of restorative and integrative approaches, before finally becoming redundant in light of the Postcorporist movement. The inventions of medicine were of course, useful for many other things. It was applicable to those who still preferred their physical bodies, and for the young who wished to enhance their physiques. However to the most advanced and respected elderly bimillenials by the time of the story, 2168 AE, medicine was superfluous, they had become ghosts in their machines.
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