Healing Magic Is the Hardest

In speculative settings, magic uses range from Utility Magic to world-breaking rituals. Very often, however, it will completely fail at fixing grievous bodily harm (unless some "natural" Healing Factor is in play) or resuscitating a recently deceased person. If healing magic is possible, it will require a disproportionate amount of power to pull off, compared to anything else on the same scale, up to a divine intervention.

This can be justified by Life being a different kind of energy, accessible only by gods, but a simpler (and more realistic) justification lies in the complexity of all living things. Even simply closing a wound is more complicated than just stitching the flesh together, and dealing with organ damage or disease is even worse. In any setting which applies this justification, expect anything as complex as turning someone into a frog to be right out.

Out-of-universe, this is done to make the characters avoid injuries as hard as they would in Real Life. When you can easily recover from grievous bodily harm or be brought back to life altogether, things get a lot less dramatic and the threats, less credible. An alternative approach to increase the risks is to introduce dangers that are either exempt from magical healing or worse than death.

Compare All Deaths Final.

Examples of Healing Magic Is the Hardest include:

Anime and Manga

• In the Lyrical Nanoha series, magic can fix cuts, bruises, and even sprained ankles but getting wounded for real means weeks to months in the hospital.
• In Naruto they can do a lot of different jutsu's including making 10,000 copies of themselves, summoning giant animals and make themselves almost immortal but the very powerful Combat Medic Lady Tsunade struggles healing Lee's bones when he gets attacked by Gaara. To be fair, in these days Lady Tsunade was extremely out of practice due to her Dark and Troubled Past.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist healing is sign that the alchemist is skilled. In the first anime this is limited to Dr. Marcoh because he has a Philosopher's Stone. In the second anime, there are more characters able to heal (like May Chang), but it's still not something that many are capable of.
• In Bleach, the Shinigami can use kido as sort-of first aid... but characters with specific healing powers are exceedingly rare. Neliel has healing saliva, which only slightly accelerates natural healing--her drooling on Ichigo is played for laughs, but the ability itself is treated as valuable. Ichigo's prospective Love Interest Orihime has the power to "reject" wounds and injuries on other people, but she can only do it slowly. This power is so sought after that Big Bad Aizen kidnapped her for it. (Sort of.)
• In Claymore, the eponymous warriors possess an impressive Healing Factor but only two characters (Cynthia and Yuma) can actually accelerate others' regeneration. The fact that there seems to have been no healing techniques used by the many previous generations of Claymores suggests that they were the only ones who actually found a way to use yoki for it. Healing normal humans is right out.
• In Scrapped Princess, Raquel Casull can blow up buildings just by looking at them funny but all her magic cannot prevent Pacifica from bleeding out after being stabbed in the back. It takes a personal intervention by Lord Mauser to fix that wound.
• In Sally the Witch, people from the Magic World can do near anything with their magic as long as they don't overly break the World's rules. . . save for healing, which involves rituals using Elemental Powers. So whenever Sally needs to heal someone (like one of Yoshiko's brothers who is attacked by a shark in the original, or a young dancer who breaks her leg right before the performance of her life in the 1989 series), she must go through trials and a lot of work to get it done.
• In Jujutsu Kaisen, Jujutsu Magic of all kinds is based on negative emotions. Healing magic is therefore almost completely unheard of, since to heal anyone a Jujutsu Sorcerer must learn a process to reverse Cursed Energy which is all but impossible for obvious reasons.; ie, Satoru Gojo did manage to unlock the process but only to heal his own injuries AND right after the near death experience that was his first fight with Touji Fushiguro. Only two of the heroes and one villain have managed to do it well enough to heal others: the local Medic Shouko Ieiri, Yuuji's Jujutsu High fellow student Yuuta Okkotsu, and Ryomen Sukuna. But things may have begun to change, as in later arcs other characters have been revealed as having Healing Factors of their own: the list includes Uraume, Yuki Tsukumo, Kenjaku (in the body of Suguru Geto), etc.
• In Ojamajo Doremi, actual healing magic is forbidden -- because if someone attempts to use magic like this, they will suffer physical backlash for it and may even die.
  • This was already implied as early as the first episode. When Doremi's crush Igarashi gets a serious injury in his leg during a soccer game, the team's Cute Sports Club Manager Maki (who likes him and is liked back, though they're Twice Shy about it) impulsively makes a wish to have him healed no matter what happened to her. Since she was wearing a magic amulet that she had purchased in Majo Rika's shop few before Doremi discovered Majo Rika's identity, the amulet's magic fulfilled her wish and healed Igarashi's leg - but in exchange, Maki got said injury on her own leg.
  • It's played far, FAR more seriously later. One of the school's bunnies was severely wounded while in the care of the girls' classmate Nanako Ookada, and the poor girl (who had lost a pet before) suffered a serious Heroic BSoD over it. Hazuki decides to heal the bunny anyway to protect Nanako's broken heart even as Aiko and Doremi beg her not to and even offer to join her in the spell casting to split / share the backlash, and when she does so, she collapses on the ground... It turns out the Queen of the Witch World had witnessed this and personally intervened to keep Hazuki from dying or being severely hurt/ill, but even she cannot completely go against the Witch World's rules: Hazuki survives, but is afflicted with a severe cold AND loses her magical powers for a short while.

Literature

• The Dragonlance books, based on the early Dungeons and Dragons games, has healing magic reserved to clerics. In the first book of the series, the appearance of clerics with healing powers is a sign that the gods have returned.
• Magical healing in The Witcher series is extremely difficult even for powerful mages, to the point where trying to treat a critical injury pretty much guarantees the healer dying from overexertion. In the non-canon Revised Ending, Yennefer (who previously brought down fortresses without breaking a sweat) passes out after healing a shallow wound on Ciri's face.
• In the Arcia Chronicles, Gerika is powerful enough to shake mountains like maracas but gives up on fixing Alexander's hunchback without even trying, saying that only Erasti may be capable of it.
• Deryni Healing is a rare talent, so rare even before the Ban on Magic that Deryni found to be Healers were actively discouraged from taking vows of celibacy. By the 1120s, only four people in the whole nation of Gwynedd are known to be able to do this, and three of them are blood relatives.
• In The Dresden Files healing magic seems to be nonexistent, at least for humans (Listens-To-Winds does have some capability in this matter, but he's a Senior Council Member and regularly goes back to medical school). Magic can be used to staunch a wound or keep someone alert, but not in any more direct fashion. Very powerful beings like the Faerie Queens can do more, including fixing a broken spine and bringing Harry back from the brink of death, with the help of a powerful Genius Loci. According to the RPG, Summer Magic can be used to heal people (at least, better than most people) as the magic grants some kind of instinctive knowledge of physiology. Miss Gard's Runic Magic and certain forms of Necromancy can also stave off death.
• In the Iron Druid Chronicles, druid magic is very powerful but it cannot do direct healing on others. Using druid magic to directly harm another living being will kill the caster on the spot and any healing process can harm the patient even if only temporarily. Druids can use healing magic on themselves but to heal other people they need to use indirect means like potions.
• In The Inheritance Cycle, magic can heal, but it takes a lot of strength - unless it's life-threatening, it's better to just let it heal on its own.
• In Rivers of London magic can do a lot to the human body, Your Head Asplode, blending people and cats, keeping a severed head alive for decades, but sadly for Lesley it cannot heal injuries. A human body is just too complex to put back together again.

Live Action TV

• Merlin seems to be this way. Merlin has a lot harder time when it comes to healing Arthur the couple of times he does it than he does doing other spells.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, supposedly they couldn't use magic to fix Joyce because "The Mystical and the Medical do not mix". Given what Willow would later do, this seemed like a cheap cop-out.

Tabletop Games

• In Dungeons and Dragons, healing spells have traditionally been the prerogative of the clerics, who not so much cast magic as channel the godly powers of the their patron deities.
  • Only in the 3rd and 3.5 editions did Arcane healing spells (i.e. ones that don't require godlike powers) begin to proliferate. Oddly enough, Bards (and anyone with shenanigans to take spells from the bard list) are fully able to heal through arcane spells. The other group who can pull that off are dragons, but they are dragons.
  • Forgotten Realms in AD&D era already had The Simbul's Synostodweomer converting arcane spells into healing magic. Of course, it's high-level, and the developing wizard already was able to do it at will, though with some risk, as a daughter of the goddess of magic.
• In Ars Magica, you can heal someone easily, but the injury would come back a relatively short while after, and just as bad. Permanent healing required expenditure of vis, i.e. a scarce magical resource.

Video Games

• Healing magic is available to mages of the Creation school in Dragon Age, but it cannot hold a candle to the Spirit Healers' abilities, which draw upon the energies of powerful benevolent spirits.

Web Comics

• Psychic healing is possible in Zap, but it takes a very strong telekinetic who has studied anatomy extensively and had a lot of practice.