Physician is the treatment of injury and illness: diagnosis, the dressing and closing of wounds, the setting of bones, extraction, surgery, and the long unglamorous management of a patient who is going to be in bed for a month. It is the most demanding of the learned trades because it requires both a theory of the body and steady hands, and a practitioner strong in one and weak in the other is a danger.
The skill is tested when a wound is treated, and what it buys is a better healing rate for the injury — the physician does not heal anybody, the body does, and the treatment decides on what terms. A patient’s own Healing Base, the average of Endurance and Will, is what the treatment multiplies.
Surgery. Extraction and surgical treatments include a Dexterity Secondary Modifier in the Physician test. Knowing what to cut is not the same as being able to cut it.
Animals. Treating a beast is a Physician test at −10, offset by any positive Animalcraft Secondary Modifier — so a farmer with a good hand for stock and a poor grasp of medicine may treat their own animals at no penalty at all, while a fine town physician who has never handled a horse is working blind.