That's plenty of time, thank you. ...What does everything involve, exactly? Is there more than just the mechanical loom? Because the bottleneck is going to be raw materials, now. She's already buying quite a large fraction of, like, all the thread- polyester from the algae sounds fascinating.

...All right, a "spinneret" for making this weird goo into thread under high pressure is going to be a little bit of a challenge unless she has a few thousand ancient dwarven master craftsmen or a couple of dedicated archmages in her back pocket or something. Does this really work. 

One of her 'students' is pretending to have much lower aptitude than she, in fact, does, and not doing a great job of hiding it. Her programme flags it. 

Ooh! This is one of those classic Mysterious Puzzles the famous scholar sets you and whoever gets it right gets a prize! 

There's no shortage of people awaiting healing. But they can guess where this is going and they can find a great candidate: a nomad, a heathen from the foul places who refuses to go near a church, blinded in some kind of accident, now a beggar and not a successful one. 

(She can provide one working system to look at, at this price; Her lab has machining equipment, and she takes a precious two hours to assemble and test the thing. As far as cloth related innovations go, there's various elaborations of the mechanical loom and mechanical spinners to do plaid and mixed colors and pattern stitching and so on... And also the sewing machine and automatic pattern cutters and stuff for turning the cloth into clothing.)

She's going to start subtly encouraging the shy one to be more confident. You know this, I can tell, come on tell me the answer?

Okay; She'll note that person (and any other suggestions) down and quietly approach her later. She'll have to make sure not to make a spectacle out of it. People are NOT to go bother this person excessively. Actually this is a good time to pivot towards the morality and ethics of medical care. Brainstorming time. What does everyone think a doctor's moral obligations, their responsibilities, are? What are things they absolutely mustn't do?

Then she can have polyester scrubs quite fast. This is amazing. Dr Baika may not quite grasp how much time making cloth normally takes. This stuff just comes out! All right, an enormous bounty on whoever can find a way to make more 'spinnerets' fast, and some way to reliably build up enough pressure... the problem is - making things move, now. It's hand power or animals or rivers. ...Possibly, er, possibly wizards could do something, but that's not... exactly safe. 

She wears the veil to lessons. She looks vaguely ridiculous but she hoped that would make it less obvious. No, sorry, she, um, doesn't quite get it. 

Well, yeah, it's a heathen, who knows what they might do.

...The same as anyone else, one would imagine, teacher. They mustn't sin, mustn't kill or maim or steal or lie. 

(She's not going to also hand over steam and electric power yet. At least, not to the same player as the rest. Competition and interrelationship is good for progress.

Ugh.

She is going to have to figure out local politics to an extent to figure out the correct foil. Awful.)

Okay, invitations and encouragement isn't the way to get through. How about interestingly tricky puzzle questions? Why is the wrist this way, what problems would there be if it were this other way?

That is a good starting point, but a doctor must also consider non-obvious ways they could hurt someone, deliberately or accidentally. When your work is with another person's body, it's easy for them to feel uncomfortable. It is in some ways a profoundly intimate thing, she sees recognition on some of her students' faces. 

In her opinion, the duties of a doctor are:

Don't make things worse. There are times for risky treatments and they're not always. They're also not never.

Explain what you intend to do, and get consent for it. It takes a long time but people will trust you more for it, if you do.

Keep the details of a patient private, unless they agree otherwise. Revealing things that are personal, embarrassing, or shameful is a kind of harm too.

Consider comfort and the mind and soul, not just the condition of the body...

She does a few quick examples.

To be clear these are her personal standards, what she holds herself to. She has not formed a firm policy or oath or whatever to take.

When they're done with the morality section she's going to talk about her plan for industrial production of antibiotics. The challenges of spooling it up, and why she's tried to kickstart plastic production. And the risk of antibiotic-resistant strains. Just imagine it. Eradicating these sicknesses in so many places. Doing good for the world. She's not intending to make factory workers out of her students, but people who understand and can teach others or discern problems without her personally attending to everything will be valuable to this goal. (How are people taking this part?)

All right, she is not able to resist solving the puzzle. She has no training in this but she's extremely sharp, when it comes to this kind of abstract reasoning, noticeably so. She has a flat kind of affect.

She wants to know how much of this there is. Dr Baika's arts, however she learned them - how much does she know, of the secrets of the body?

This is coming across... interestingly! Surely a 'doctor' can never know for sure that a treatment won't do harm? Where's the threshold? 

Surgeons actually often find telling people what you're going to do inside them makes them faint, or tense up, or scream. Should they start doing that anyway? 

Anyway, this sounds like deep wisdom, they're making a careful note of it.

The one trained physician among them, who has been listening to all this with a vaguely horrified air and offended silence, looks on the verge of storming away over this. 

The others are some combination of intrigued, awed, or thoughtful. 

(How can they stop antibiotic resistance?)

Well, the average person takes 15 years of study before they can truly be called a Doctor, in her mind. The brilliant and determined can get there much faster, of course. But there are decades and decades of additional study to be taken- She is older than she looks- And easily dozens of specialties.

The physician is welcome to conclude that she's a crackpot and leave. Or to prove her wrong with, you know, proof and not just fancy theories. Until then he's just another student.

There are subtleties. Obviously. In many places the threshold is your own inner judgement. Do you feel good about this decision? Would you stand before God and say it was the reasonable and correct one to make, at the time, with what you knew and had tried already? But there are also tools to help you- Guidelines, trends and thresholds learned from doctors past, case studies and other knowledge. It's generally better, if it could be one of two things and one thing requires a safe treatment and the other a risky one, to try the safe one first. And you don't have to insist on explaining things to people if they don't want to hear it, especially with things that make them squeamish like surgery, but it's good if you can at least impart onto them the risks and what to expect, how to get better and prevent it from happening again.

You can slow it by not prescribing antibiotics improperly, and by making sure patients finish the full course and don't let the infection return. But you can't stop it entirely. The only way, at that point, is creating entirely new strains of antibiotics that the bacteria have not yet learned to cope with. They are many that she knows of, but not infinitely many. Which is, of course, phenomenally expensive and not certain of success. Even the most powerful tools must be wielded correctly.

(Speaking of proof, she's planning to provide demonstrations tomorrow. Things like the sealed-jar experiment, for other aspects of what she's teaching. What do they doubt her on? What things she is saying seem unreasonable and incorrect? Let's discuss experiment design!)

Gods damn it, it would probably still take her a year or two at best and they simply cannot spare her for that long. 

He was trained under The Rigid One herself! Do the great authorities mean nothing to her? And of proofs, there are a dozen famous cures he can recite without pausing for breath - he does so - if he is to sully himself as a mere empirical. (He says this word as a slur.) They are endowed by the court of the Caliph himself, gods uphold him, this is an insult!

She snorts and instantly castigates herself for it. 

He just glowers. 

(She knows Dr Baika wants her space and that's fine, but can she review all of this on the ethics of medicine?)

They doubt: 

- That decay cannot arise spontaneously from within a body, but only by the action of these animalcules. 

- That there is any difference between all this and wizardry. Making an eye might be impressive but it's a bit worryingly close to Necromancy, which everyone knows is awful and terrifying. 

- That, like, everything physicians have ever said about how the body works is wrong. Can she prove that?

"The established authorities do mean very little to me, that's correct. You are being disruptive to the class. Please be polite, or else leave."

-That's a misunderstanding, really a person's body is a lot of interacting animalcules as well. She calls them 'cells'. Decay can arise spontaneously from within a body, that's called cancer or one of these dozen other diseases. Let's break out the hi-power microscopes and take turns looking at some animalcules!

-The thing that makes it not wizardry is that you don't need to invite magic into your head to do it, that it can be done repeatedly, and it's not really nearly as dangerous as Silvermoon seems to be rumored to be if you're doing it right. Repeat the line about it being a craft.

-She is an empiricist and considers that the only correct way to learn. Bring her the sick and she can explain why they are sick and fix them, she is very confident about that. Her proof shall be in her works, and importantly, when other people can also do the same thing. If it's more general doubt, that will probably just take time, because yes this is all very complicated and it's hard to see how it all fits together at first. There is a thing she might explain and demonstrate regarding the work the college of physicians do to help people, but she is going to save that for later, when she's more assured that her students are reasonable and sane. It's still not wizardry though, it's only a very slight dark secret.

......She's not going to make students turn over their notes for inspection, but she will recommend that they do. She can also review them for more misunderstandings.

Hey! Silvermoon has a reputation for being extraordinarily safe, if you can somehow possibly go there and be admitted! A 90% survival rate is incredible! Even most of the 10% aren't actually dead! Medicine is even safer magic?

(He's not leaving, just sulking quietly and unpleasantly.)

These 'microscopes' are wonderful works of high optics beyond the surviving arts of this age and soon even more philosophers and opticians will be wanting to talk to her. They have many questions about how the few surviving ancient optical devices could possibly have been made. 

...Those things are part of us? That... wow. The body is not one uniform thing, but itself composed of many living things - are they in turn composed of smaller creatures? Is there any end to the recursion? 

There are a lot of hedge-herbalists and charlatans and so on in the world who will tell you they know it works 'because it did before' (this in the eye-rolling tones of an Outgroup Catchphrase) and make up some nonsense about why. 

...One scholar here, after intense internal debate, since they are about a deeply important mission... will approach her privately and volunteer that, um, inviting Spells into your head isn't the only way to learn wizardry. Is that what they do at Silvermoon? He can... see how that would be fast... and maybe, possibly, safer in a "dipping your wet finger in the molten lead is only dangerous if you're slow" sort of way... Spells are advanced magic. He's heard. One should approach the Art cautiously and respectfully, building up from lesser workings from inside oneself. So they say. 

She can hear. She works hard to keep a very straight face, then remembers that she's wearing a veil and not supposed to be listening in. 

There is an end to the recursion; the structures inside cells are the next layer, and then the proteins those are made of are the last thing that can be reasonably said to be 'alive' in some way.

...Naevys.

"I suppose I don't know much about magic. It was an unpleasant experience learning that much. Regardless, medicine is still not magic."

Oh no, does she interrupt here? She should dismiss this folly with an ominous warning - she isn't sure how to actually do that - 

Medicine lets you seal plagues and build working eyes. Medicine is obviously magic.