Healing Minister Opens Infirmary to Hunt for Curses in Pox Vials

Friends, I have kept a temple infirmary in the Lower City for twenty-two years, and I can tell you what one needs: clean linens, a big kettle, and somebody willing to sit up with the feverish. So I perked right up this week when Royal Minister of Healing Robbert Fennedy the Younger, the Worm-Touched, cut a ribbon on a new infirmary at the Noble Institutes of Healing. Then I read the fine print. This one is for hunting curses in the pox vials.

Fennedy had company on the steps: Archcleric Jaybird Battlecharya of the Institutes, Grand Almoner Mehmagus the Great and Powerful of the Coffers of Medicine & Succor, and High Cleric Errica Swartsword of the Clerics' Disease Council. They smiled the way you smile when the man holding the scissors signs your wages. "We must listen to patients and families who report vial injuries, not dismiss or gaslight them," said Fennedy. It's a fine sentence. I would embroider it on a pillow if he had ever once listened to the herbalists telling him the vials work.

Here is the plan. The infirmary will follow folk after their vials, look for ways to care for anyone harmed, and "may review" the whole schedule of childhood vials the crown recommends. Mehmagus's Coffers will now pay healers a fee every time they write a suspected injury into the Vial Effects Ailment Register, and Fennedy is rebuilding the Register so a complaint is easier to file than a dog license. Paying healers by the complaint, friends. Sit with that one over your tea.

The old herbals say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of poultice. The actual ledgers agree. Between 2006 and 2024, the crown's injury purse paid out roughly once per million doses across 5.65 billion doses, while the vials headed off an estimated 508 million illnesses and more than a million deaths. The Minister reportedly wants a hard look at the aluminum in some vials. Scholars have taken that hard look many times, and the aluminum keeps coming back fine. Fennedy, for his part, has a long habit of pinning ailments on vials that never caused them.

Now, there is a real grievance buried in all this, and I won't pretend otherwise. The injury purse still caps payment at 250,000 gp, and a claim takes two or three years to settle because yearly claims have jumped from 386 to more than 2,000. Fix that, Minister, and I'll bake you a pie. Instead the realm sits 114 cases shy of 4,000 measles this year while the Ministry of Humours & Healing builds a fancier complaint box.

My friend Nyx Spindlecoil tells me the new Register will have a scrying app with one-tap reporting. Go outside, Nyx. The leaves are turning and nobody bills the Coffers for a walk.

For anyone with a sore arm after their autumn vials (I had mine Tuesday, and I'm fine, thank you), make a pot of chicken-and-barley with plenty of thyme and a parsnip if you have one. It won't cure a thing the vial didn't already handle. It will make you feel looked after, and that is half of medicine.

Rest well, friends. — Brother Wendell