So, we've actually gone over this before, here and there, in the thread. No worries, it's super heug and all that.
So, in the 2E infobook Trade, Medicine, and More, it is described that a good bit of early knowledge on medicine in the Old World came from elves. The first Millennium of the Empire's existence had hundreds and thousands of scholars working on herbs, ailments, and so on. All coming around from the first major elf medical scholar known to the Old World, a dude named Gaelen. Now, setting aside such biases, obviously plenty of human tribes and dwarfs besides didn't simply exist in a weird state of no medicine at all. That would be absurd beyond any suspension of disbelief. But it still led to an overall 'Gaelenic' philosophy of medicine for lack of any better common term, and one that no human scholar extended beyond the principles of for a long, long time. Gaelenic philosophy is basically thus:
These focused on observing a patient's colour, temperature and temperament, and then treating him with the appropriate tincture, powder or salve. The "Gaelenic" philosophy, as it eventually became known, likens the human body to a seedling, needing only the right balance of nutrients to grow strong. This mindset was the core of all Imperial medicine until two events changed the Empire forever.
^The first aforementioned event was the Black Plague in 1111, where medicine straight up failed, no herbal remedy worked, an invisible danger, etc. Diseases became regarded - all of them - as the work of Chaos itself and needed to be literally burned out with fire. Doctors who tried curing things instead of doing that were condemned, and medicine basically entered a dark age.
The dark age included, as some already mentioned, necromancy rising up around the same time:
At the same time the Necromancers were rising to power, every day performing darker and more perverted explorations into the nature of flesh. For the first time, the temple of the body was thrown open, and as these dark sorcerers made it their unholy playground, they also learned a great deal about anatomy. Much of it they (thankfully) took to their graves, but some of it was preserved and passed on, thus producing the greatest leap forward in medicine since Gaelen. Works such as The Flayed Man and The Creeping Flesh date from this era, and are among the most prized of all medical works—and the most suppressed. Necromantic studies were the keepers of medical knowledge for over 500 years until another great tragedy sparked a new look at medicine.
^ Said second thing was the Red Pox of 1786, which was a much more mundane disease than the Black Plague. To make a long story short, this began to make academics start looking at disease as a natural phenomenon compared to purely Chaos. Looking at animals, that sort of thing. Human dissection still very much considered necromancy, but they could look at animals. The human body became recognized as something closer to a 'nexus of flesh, bone, organs and vessels, each of which could be examined and treated separately.'
Then came Leonardo di Miragliano during the Tilean renaissance, and while one of his most notable contributions to the Empire was the steam tanks and other funny bits and bobs, he also got involved in medicine. Figures, right? Gaelen the elf saw the body as 'sacred and inviolate, to be nurtured as a whole, never cut apart'. The new philosophy, brought about by the greatest human engineer of his time, brought about the 'Mechanicals' medical philosophy. Body a big ol machine with cogs and what not. Cutting and amputating is like fixing a clock.
Of course, most doctors in the modern age can appreciate both sides, with using some holistic refined medicines and others doing amputations and the like, but there are some people where it's a matter of morality and faith, and teaching. So Gaelenic/Mechanical splitting of medical theory and practice is an issue of all modern Old World medicine. By the 2520s Imperial Calendar, Mechanical is the prevailing medical opinion of Tilea and Estalia.
However.
The same is not true of the Empire, which is actually for more Gaelenic. Also it focuses a lot on the Cult of Morr, which is funny because the Tome of Salvation has the Cult's mega main headquarters in Tilea, but the Empire is the Empire after all. Different cultures and everything. Dissections of the human body are allowed in Tilea, but it is considered something only possible in such decadent southern states. The Empire sees such things as a violation of the will of Morr:
The Empire, however, still resists this practice, seeing it as a violation of the will of Morr: after death, a man must be placed in Morr's Garden as soon as possible, not be opened out and toyed with. Any act of human dissection is considered necromancy, and remains punishable by death. Elements within the University of Nuln publicly protest this band; many others simply contravene the law in secret.
It is now widely accepted amongst the medical community that the frontiers of medicine cannot be expanded without examining the human body. This is so much the case that grave robbing is one of the most profitable criminal occupations to be found, with demand sky-high for the services of any 'resurrection man' strong enough to heft a shovel and brave enough to risk being burnt at the stake. A budding department in the generally regarded conservative University of Nuln now includes a dissection demonstration as part of its fifth year curriculum (after swearing all the students to secrecy, of course). They require so many bodies that a criminal organisation known as the Resurrection Brotherhood has evolved and become very wealthy filling the demand. Led by a ruthless Halfling known as Bloody Jacob, the Brotherhood's motto is "Dead before supper, delivered before breakfast."
So you've got some absolutely wild issues with people and medicine and education on the matter, not even getting into how obviously your teacher's philosophies will inevitably get passed on down to you in the course of your education.
Not to mention how superstition and belief and truth can mix and meld oddly in Warhammer and the Realm of Chaos and magic and mutation and all that. Consider this:
The head and throat are considered akin to the Realm of Law, the heart, circulation and liver likened to the Realm of Man and the stomach, bowel and sexual organs associated with Chaos. Each area is also associated with an exhalation—one of the Three Fluids—the colour and composition of which is used for diagnosis. The throat is judged by the phlegm, the heart by the blood and the bowel by the faeces: if any of these are darkly coloured, the physician will know the area in question is afflicted. The darker the colour, the worse the sickness.
Like...there's something there, but they're not necessarily talking about bacterial infections or staph or fungal and the differences therein that can be studied with a microscope and other lab specific sampling and testing like IRL, you know what I mean? Certain parts of the Cult of Morr and many doctors believe that blood rises and falls in the body like the tides, as in, washing from one end to the other like a miniature ocean inside of you, or water inside a bottle. Not to mention, the Shallyan Order of the Bleeding Heart provides care, food, and housing, and medicine second, and people love them. They do not ignore medicine and medical treatments, but they do not focus upon them as much as their regular stuff, and also importantly, their actual divine powers. There's even a note that some Shallyans get called in to deal with botched surgeries so often that many Shallyans think of surgery at all - the very practice of it - to just be basically human butchery. But it also notes that not every temple has an anointed Shallyan with divine power behind them to deal with the truly diseased, pestilence-stricken, and insane. So then you got to get a doctor.
So! Here's some other notes we have on common Old World medical knowledge/practices:
The extent of surgical knowledge in the Old World includes setting broken bones (if the break is clean), staunching the flow of blood and the spread of infection (if treatment is performed quickly enough), and stitching skin to hold together what's left (if the wound is narrow enough). Anything more complicated is solved by removing the affected area with either a heavy cleaver or the slower but neater bone saw. A good surgeon is one who can cut off the damaged areas without destroying the entire appendage; a great surgeon is one who can do it quickly, because anaesthetic remains a mystery and because the longer a wound is exposed, the greater the risk of infection.
So obviously part of this is a bit wonky, because we've got alcohol, pain-killing/numbing herbs and poultices, and so on. Magical painkillers and what not as well, same for dwarfs. Probably something called Valaya's Comfort is probably a brew made for medical practices in the Karaz Ankor, yeah. Also, bleeding is still a very, very common method of treatment for both Mechanicals and Gaelinic physicians.
And stuff like this:
As described in WFRP, the current favoured treatments for insanity are either surgery or exotic drugs. Small traces of heavy metals are currently in vogue: slivers of iron, silver or mercury are placed in wine and prescribed twice a day. Mercury, also called Sigmar's Blood, is an expensive but increasingly ubiquitous wonder drug, considered useful for a wide variety of mental and physical illnesses. Taking a tincture of mercury grants the prescribing physician +5% to his Heal Test of any disease or affliction, however anyone taking mercury must also make a Toughness Test or gain 1 Insanity point. This does not replace the automatic Insanity gained for a much stronger dose.
So! Would an Old World, Empire specifically, known about nerves and nerve damage? Not necessarily. Even as a Slaaneshi, and yes, you have stuff exemplified in a line by the succubus Sarrissa from The Secret World video game:
"You, me...on a beach of razor fossils. The vultures of Leng plucking your nerve endings like a fabulous instrument. Call me sometime."
So, sure, yeah, a Slaaneshi could know such things. They have Pain and Pleasure, and the two are opposites yet entwined inextricably, taken to inhuman excesses in the course of Slaanesh and those that are of it. But, knowing how to cause the most pain, to pluck nerve endings, to burn them or inflame them, to quiet and numb them, and so on? Absolutely something in their purview, even if the victim would just see them wave a hand or something and feel it. However, that kind of knowledge? Why on earth would they just give it away, when you can have someone sacrifice, labor for you, as a payment? Your lower level informant cultist like that guy was, not a full blown major cult leader or inner circle member, would not, more likely than not, be granted such knowledge and information without immense effort and payment to either the rest of the Cult or Slaanesh or one of Its servants.
The wizards and mages and what not that are especially utilizing Ghyran and are thus immensely in tune with life might have a better idea of things and how they go. You can sear wounds shut with Aqshy, or restore them to health with Hysh, cleansing and what not, but Ghyran gets into the nitty gritty of life itself, the organisms and water and earth and what not rather than more ephemeral airy concepts like how Hysh does things. Qhaysh is mega magic melding so it's another thing altogether, a thing of imagination and will made manifest on a level beyond most singular Wind stuff. So they might know much more intimately stuff about veins, nerves, bones, organ, tissue, etc. but not necessarily know the exact terminology of what they are restoring, or why each does what it does. On the other hand, they might know them intimately, instinctively, unnaturally/naturally through that magic to the point that they might not know an occipital lobe from a temporal one on the brain, or that the bile from the gallbladder does this, or how the different vertebrae of the spinal cord are connected to different parts of the body's command and control function, but that they do.
As for an elven academic or dragon, they could possibly know about cell division, but not as we would know it, because to them magic and that sort of existence and perception are just inhuman enough to see it in a way we don't. They would have had thousands upon thousands of years with knowledge and practice beyond what Mendell sort of stuff could do, or yeah, changes from the environment or behavior could do things without actually knowing precisely what the heck DNA is or a sequence of it. Knowing about innermost secrets of the body like that, that there is some sort of method to the madness of biology, sure, but DNA proper? Probably not. They don't really need to, at the end of the day, for the most part at least.
As for higher level quantum physics...at the upper reaches, could we really say that magic isn't akin to that, or vice versa?
Like, we know that Hysh and Shyish can literally futz around with time. In the Realm of Chaos, especially, and how that spills out into the world, all IRL assumptions about quantum physics and the laws of reality kind of break down. Or, at least, can be a bit bendy.
As for Lizardmen, that question doesn't really work because all that they are is of magic. They were handcrafted by the otherworldly transdimensional space/time commanding/beyonding Old Ones. Their knowledge of the world is wholly colored by this, by the Old Ones who gave rise to them, and the metaphysical factors tied to their existence past, present, and future. Could they make a gun? Maybe, a Slann is definitely capable of figuring that sort of thing out. But they don't need to make a mundane explosion when they can wave a hand and will fire and heat and concussive force into existence. You know what I mean? Even in the End Times/Age of Sigmar, their pyramid/stone ships are space ships and stellar crossing starships powered with magic, in a reality of magic, with magic aid, and then they died, and half-became constellations of magic and such.
Does that help answer anything? Apologies if it got too rambly.
