Illnesses, sure absolutely, poisonings, well maybe (who can tell if an illness is a poison or not? There is brisk debate on this topic), deformities are also a topic of brisk debate, children are allowed in the bathhouses and sometimes come, they mostly allow coughing people in but obviously not plagued people (various warding gestures, waving around entire strings of holy symbols).

People from Sardis visit occasionally! Occasionally. They do not get tourism from Oppara. Oppara is, like, the moon. It costs this many sestarii and different people claim to be the cheapest place.

There are people willing to be bribed to show her to places you can get to the fountains without paying, right now? Not very many places, obviously the owners close them up when they get the chance. And there's more springs way over there on that mountain (points at hilltop) but people only rarely make the trek.

None of this really seems like it adds up to a lower infant mortality rate in Sardis. Maybe if the water was magical, but it doesn't seem to be.

She asks where the local Pharasmin cleric is; the town is large enough that it ought to have one. Does the cleric know anything about the springs and their effect on the health of young children here? Has she ever lived anywhere else, to compare the rate of infant deaths to? Is there any advice that she gives new mothers to keep their babies healthy?

The local Pharasmin cleric is an elderly midwife who thinks that children don't spend enough time properly clean and resting, and that therefore hot springs are good for children because they are warm and give them a break. She lived in an even smaller village before Pharasma chose her, which had worse child mortality because it didn't have a cleric of Pharasma and she had to send all the way to Sardis if there was going to be a new mother.

Some young mothers are going to visit the faeries if their children have problems, but that's not very safe, now is it, faeries being faeries. Her advice is to keep mother and child warm and make sure the child gets fed as much as it needs, and it's very important the mother stays healthy enough so she can still produce milk because cow's milk really isn't as good.

Well, that's all completely sensible, but it's the kind of sensible that Pharasmin midwives are everywhere.

An ideal investigation would hit Sardis, too, but it's late now, and she's booked tomorrow and the next day, and she doesn't really want to spend her next free night asking questions to random people in Sardis who are probably just bad at keeping records.

She tells her secretary to arrange to hire a group of ordinary, low-powered Taldan adventurers to investigate Karakuru and Sardis for anything that might explain their low infant mortality rate, with a doubled reward if they can find anything that turns out to be of widespread medical use. She then directs her own focus to more interesting questions.

It takes a few weeks before the report gets back, because these adventurers were thorough and wanted to check everything themselves.

300-500 years ago (accounts vary) the bronze dragon Ascertul died near Sardis and a bountiful orchard grew over his corpse. It is said that those who eat fruits from this orchard are healthier and live longer lives. The adventurers spoke to the uncle of the man who owns the orchard, who said he never eats anything else and is one hundred and seven years old.

There is a clan of faeries located near Gol Hill who will take sick babies and give the parents healthy babies. One of the mothers let the party's cleric look at the baby and it seemed to resemble a normal human baby to all the divinations they had available.

A naiad dwelling north of Karakuru purifies the river waters.

Nobody in the village of Silvergallows can die on the last day of each season. They say this is because the village headman's great great great grandmother once saved an arch-priest of Pharasma who blessed the town in gratitude.

A foreign paladin of Shizuru is said to have abandoned all of his magical possessions somewhere around what is now the village South Whispertree to go live an ascetic life in the mountains. They've all been lost now, but the adventurers eventually found a Shizuran holy symbol embedded in a cobblestone, with a faint aura of healing magic. The people of the village don't seem particularly healthy for normal farmers, but do maybe seem particularly healthy for farmers whose fields are sparse and rocky and also were burned pretty badly by a rampage of fire drakes last summer.

There's also a collection of a few dozen other rumors that the adventurers were unable to substantiate.

As an herbalist, she's most interested in the orchard, but it seems a very poor explanation for low infant mortality in the face of other health problems. The fairies who take the sick babies and give out healthy ones seem like the best explanation, all told, even though they would have to be taking in a remarkable number of babies to make an observable difference in the overall numbers. Perhaps the most unlikely element of this theory is that so many mothers would accept a method that doesn't save their child. Although, now that she thinks of it, tales of the fairies kidnapping children and replacing them with their own often claim that the children live on in the first world. It's possible that eating fairy food doesn't kill you if you're transported bodily into the first world all the time, rather than nightly only in your dreams. It seems hard to say whether such an existence would be better or worse than simply moving on to the Boneyard... but, on the other hand, she can hardly claim not to understand the impulse of a desperate young mother to do something incredibly stupid on the off chance that it saves her child.

It's a pity that kidnapping and replacing children isn't really what you would call a useful medical intervention.

Things are going pretty well at the Gol Hill branch of Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal Hospital. It took a while, but the locals are much more likely to come to them before their babies are on the brink of death, at this point, and they've got some tiny preemie twins in the incubators which everyone on staff always absolutely loves because you get to see the little tiny babies get bigger. Gandlun's Mercy Neonatal does not believe in using images of saved babies in promotional images back home but they're happy to use numbers - a thousand babies saved, two thousand - and donations are rolling in.  They might add some more sites on this planet soon. The local government hasn't had them murdered at all.

Baron Tortellis was initially assuming that at some point the fairies would cause enough trouble that he had to stamp them out, and then he'd be scolded for having let them slide for so long, but when they stay in their tower and do nothing but heal babies he just hikes up tolls on the river, saying it's to pay for dredging it out so it's traversible out of the rainy season. He doesn't actually dredge it out because he doesn't know who to pay for that work but the tolls are a healthy income source.

His priest put up a fuss for a while but Tortellis nodded very solemnly every time and then didn't do anything about the fairies and eventually the priest dropped it.