Umbagollah's doctors. (excerpted from A Guide to Good Health, a widely-distributed government pamphlet) Sniffing Doctors. Sniffing doctors, and most other Umbagollians, believe that illnesses remind the body of its mortality. The body realises that it is not a unique and important consciousness, but a decaying piece of meat. Shocked by this insight, it begins to subtly decompose. By smelling the air around a person, a good sniffing doctor can determine, first, if any decomposition is occurring (in other words, if the person is really sick), and secondly, the nature of the illness. The doctor then refines her diagnosis by smelling the sick person's breath, armpits, feet, farts, groin, ears and hands. In addition to normal medical treatment, a Sniffing Doctor will prescribe a number of fresh-smelling pomanders which the patient carries around in small bags pressed against their skin. If an decomposing body is reminded of healthy scents then it will be able to heal itself rapidly. If that doesn't work, then the doctor tries the opposite trick of exposing the patient to evil-smelling people and hopes that the sick body will revolt against this unpleasentness and become healthy-smelling out of sheer disgust. Feeling Doctors Feeling doctors are usually delicate, attentuate, thin; always trembling slightly and enormously sensitive. They are also frequently blind. The best Feeling Doctors do not even have to touch a person to know what is wrong with them. All they do is hold their fingertips or the end of their nose a few centimetres away from the skin and they will feel the sickness quivering. "That's a chest cold," they'll say, or, "You have leukemia." The less serious the illness is, the sharper and more rapid the vibration it will give off as it sprints through the patient's system, making the bloodstream ring. Something more severe will set off a low repititious boom, like the vibrations of a large bell wrapped in felt. Hearing Doctors. Hearing doctors use their ears rather than their fingers, but they hear the same ringing and booming that the Feeling Doctors senses. They are more precise than Feeling Doctors, but also more expensive. Their prescriptions tend to revolve around hiring a small chamber orchestra to establish itself in the patient's house and play sweet music day and night for several weeks. This infuses the sufferer's body with healthy rhythmns in much the same way that a pomander reminds the Smelling Doctor's patient what it is to smell good, but it costs more than most people can afford. Find out more about Umbagollian medicine, or read about the building where most of these doctors live: The Tower of Foot.