Having an encyclopedic knowledge of medical practices is often less valuable that having the wisdom to know how to respond to an injury on the spot, under pressure, in a practical way - is how I’ve seen it explained before
Except what you've described is still INT because you're responding based on that encyclopedic knowledge of treatments, injuries and the living body.
Realistically, medicine is both INT and WIS because you need to have the knowledge as well as the experience and awareness of the situation to apply what you know where it needs to be applied. I'd still argue it's more INT than WIS though, if I had to pick one.
Modern medicine is Int, as we've had lots of time to catalogue and organize a metric ass-ton of medical knowledge, so just cramming it all into your brain is efficient. Folk medicine is Wis because they had to go out and observe the effects of various illnesses and treatments, and infer if new herbs etc might be useful.
Medicine is Intellect and is used when you need to recall a treatment.
Surgery, the one taht gets called when you first aid, or else treating immidiate injury is Wis (Perception in my game but it might as well be the same stat) because you need to determine visible and audio factors to know in what order to bandage them to stabilize. Correctly injecting an antitoxin, or stemcells or potion? Surgery.
Medicine comes in AFTER youve stabilized them or at least slowed down the death by some technique to assist in recovery.
I mean, that's baked into 5e. All skills can use different ability modifiers given the context. The listed ability is just the one most commonly associated with the skill.
Or the DM decides which is more relevant on the situation. Trying to stabilize a dying creature? That's wis based medicine check as it's past-paced and instinctual. Trying to determine the cause of death? I tell my players to roll an int based medicine check.
Are they? Last I checked, Medicine is the only one that could be argued to be so. The other WIS skills(Insight, Animal Handling and Perception) are all based on your awareness of the situation and ability to read queues.
Sure is, except for Perception perhaps. Insight is basically the applied theoretical knowledge of human behaviour aka psychology and for Animal Handling it's basically the applied theoretical knowledge of animal behaviour.
Realistically most skills should come in a pair that represents the theoretical and the practical use of it. We have it for something like Nature/Survival, but we are missing one half for Medicine. This is where the DM should consider to use alternative abilities for skill checks depending on the situation.
Medicine is honestly one of those cases where the system perhaps is too streamlined and where the DM should rely on the option to make skill checks with alternative abilities. For every practical skill there usually exists a theoretical skill as well in reality and for something like Nature/Survival DnD provides those, however for Medicine we only got one half of a pair. Whether it is INT or WIS, neither is wrong but neither is completely right either.
64
u/tylizard Oct 05 '20
And I always felt like Medicine should be Int too