A moment in Game of Thrones that everyone forgets about because of all the other terrible stuff is when that knight guy got the incurable stone skin disease that turns you into a spooky monster man but then the chubby library guy goes theres a book that says to rub some stuff on it, that’s the trick
I bet Stannis felt pretty dumb about all that blood magic stuff he was doing to help his flammable daughter. He could have just been like this was all solved…thanks to the books at my local library
He didn’t do any of that. If you catch the disease at a young enough age there’s a chance you won’t go crazy and die, but you’ll live normally with some permanent disfigurement. By the time the show started she wasn’t in any danger. The blood magic stuff was all for securing the throne.
An all timer of a talky fantasy prestige show transformed into a screenwriting majors C plus capstone project overnight. A falling off that will be studied for generations to come.
I was thinking about that today for some reason too and got retroactively mad at the "dean" or whatever who didn't immediately go "alright what did you learn, how would you improve the process, can you teach it to others because apparently we have an entire wing dedicated to this illness".
"we need a narrative device that can carry these two characters through some emotional and vocational growth"
"Easy: one guy flays the skin off the other guy without anesthetic for medical reasons"
We don't have "milk of the poppy" which is talked about in at least one scene in every other episode but here's some prison hooch. I'm sure removing a layer of skin next to all your major arteries won't be affected by your muscles spasming in pain.
Sam Tarly can sneak into the library's restricted section but he can't find any loose painkillers in the most advanced medical facility in the seven kingdoms
"There's nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it. And who has a better story than Stephen the stickler ward nurse who never lost a med and Peter the affable but easily duped library guard?"
if I remember the explanation they gave was that the library knew about the technique but it was super dangerous because of how contagious the disease was, in which case chubby guy just invented sterile surgical technique and like you are saying, nobody did anything with that why exactly
some other guy died of an infected wound a couple seasons earlier and had to be resurrected by fire priest magic, they could probably use modern medicine is all I'm saying.
Doctors didn't even wash their hands between autopsies and surgery until recently history, and the first guy who tried to impose hand washing was locked up in a booby-hatch.
I'd say the maesters being intransigent is an honest reflection of much of medical history.
I liked the bit where they spent eight years building up the White Walkers, defeated them in their first battle and still had more than enough troops left to capture the most fortified city in the whole continent
Yeah like they never thought to check books or rub all the stuff they had during the whole run of this crazy mystery disease, and wasn’t part of the treatment excusing the infected tissue like they would have been doing all those things just as a fuck around anyway
If I am remembering correctly, Jim Broadbent rejected trying it because the risk of getting infected doing it was too high. But Sam had Plot armor so he could do it with ease.
I assume most of the people who reach the diseases terminal stage are those who are too poor to have access to the type of medical care which would permit this type of recovery.
Back then if you had a wing of diseased people you would have no shortage of freaks looking to fuck around with them that was like the main thing people did for fun
"Oh. That terrible mythical legendary disease that drives its sufferers mad and gives us a mechanism for a zombie-chase scene in a boat?
Yeah, it's ringworm, basically. A little debriedment will do the trick"
