I’m a Harry Potter geek. I have all seven books on CD, and they’re pretty much in continuous rotation in my car to listen to during my commute. Which means that I’ve listened to each book probably four or five times in addition to the first time I read them. Lately, I’ve been noticing something that I wonder if Rowling was even paying attention to: has anyone else noticed the fact that Harry gets hit in the head a lot?
When he’s not being blown back into walls and hitting his head hard enough to see stars, he’s being knocked over backwards by various jinxes, blasted over so hard he hits the floor with his head by Snape during Occlumency lessons, and being hit by various Quidditch paraphernalia (bludgers, bats, etc.) during matches? I haven’t actually counted the number of times he’s done this over the course of the series, but I *have *noticed that nobody ever seems to think it’s a big deal. I mean, Madame Hooch hustles Neville immediately off to the hospital wing when he falls off his broom and breaks his wrist (as she should), but when Harry cracks his head hard enough to nearly knock him unconscious, they just pick him up and go on with whatever they were doing.
This kid’s either got the hardest head in Britain, or else the whole wizarding thing is just a big illusion brought about by multiple concussions, and in the secret 8th book of the series he’s going to wake up in a Muggle hospital room after a 7 year coma and regret the loss of all his cool wizard fantasies.
Wizards get hurt a lot in the books, get magical medical treatment and do just fine. Watch a quiddich game once, there are kids bouncing off poles and smacking into each other and they don’t even make them wear helmets.
The author actually makes a point of mentioning that wizards and witches are much more physically resistant to damage than muggles. I thought it was a nice touch.
Bingo.
No, seriously*, with magical medical treatments, why not? Surely they can fix him up better than we Muggles can.
*For very small values of “serious”.
Are any of his head injuries not caused by magic? Because it always seemed to me like magical injuries are not as bad as they would be in the muggle world.
There must be some kind of wonderful magical medicine, or else, some kind of Wizarding rule against parental lawsuits. Otherwise at least one kid would routinely be dead after every Quidditch match.
