Chamber of Secrets: Page 174
Replacing bones with magic, a deep dive into wizarding jobs, pranks with a boneless, rubbery arm, and Skele-Gro's corporate structure.
Welcome back!
The newsletter has been off a few weeks — but we’re back, and better than ever. I hope everyone enjoyed the last few weeks of 2021 and first few weeks of 2022. I really hope everyone enjoys the first new issue of the new year. Let’s dive in!
“The sad, limp remainder of what, half an hour before, had been a working arm.”
How’s that for an opening?
It’s spectacular, of course. Ordinarily, you don’t read the Harry Potter series one page at a time, but when you do, you get some great out-of-context material. Imagine if you saw a piece of paper blowing down the street in the wind, and when you picked it up, you saw that someone had scrawled, “the sad, limp remainder of what, half an hour before, had been a working arm.” You’d think you were in for something way darker than what we’re about to see. Then again, maybe that’s because you’re a Muggle.
What’s happened, of course, is that Harry has just been smashed in the elbow by the bludger we’ll soon learn was enchanted by Dobby. Lockhart, attempting to play the hero, tries to repair Harry’s bones; instead, he removes them. So Harry goes up to the hospital wing, where he’ll have to spend a little while. Madam Pomfrey is careful to tell him that while it would have been easy to repair the bones, a quick tap of the wand and he’s good to go, re-growing the bones is much nastier. It can be done, but he’ll have to stay the night.
I have to say: we talk a lot here about how so much of the magic in the series doesn’t make that much sense, but this sounds utterly reasonable to me. Repairing broken bones should be easy for a wizard: you just have to put two little pieces of bone back together. But regrowing bones should be much more difficult and time-consuming. If you were going to do it with a spell, you’d have to conjure the bones, then somehow transport them into Harry’s arm and reconnect them with the tendons and muscles and everything that makes arms work. It seems incredibly difficult. Skele-Gro, Madam Pomfrey’s preferred method, is unpleasant and takes a long time, but works fine.
This actually reminds me of something I think about all the time: the whole “what jobs do wizards have?” argument. People are always debating about what jobs can even exist in the Wizarding World. Wizards can conjure pretty much anything they want, the argument goes, and they don’t really need services either since they can accomplish almost everything via magic. So how are wizards besides the ones we see in the books, mostly teachers and government workers, finding employment?
I don’t buy this argument at all, and this scene with Madam Pomfrey perfectly illustrates why. Madam Pomfrey is basically a Primary Care Provider. She’s not a specialist, but she can do a lot of stuff that Muggle doctors can’t, since she can do magic. But there are some things that she can’t do: as we see when Professor McGonagall and Katie Bell are transferred to St. Mungo’s, some healing is beyond her capabilities. Clearly, though, there are other doctors with more advanced equipment and techniques who can do it.
Madam Pomfrey can’t instantly regrow 33 bones if they accidentally disappear; it takes a whole night. But what if the star seeker of the Tutshill Tornadoes accidentally removes the bones in his arm during a match? Don’t you think the team has an advanced orthopedist on staff, one of the country’s top experts in sports medicine, who can do the same procedure instantly? If that doctor exists, he or she probably works at a private practice, which means they’ll need administrators and nurses. Those administrators and nurses will need uniforms, which they’ll have to buy from a sales representative. That sales representative needs office space, which has to be maintained by a landlord who employs maintenance staff. And so on.
The whole “there are no magical jobs” argument is based on the false premise that every wizard can instantly get whatever they want via magic. Readers believe this, I think, because most of the wizards they see are incredibly skilled: either Hogwarts teachers or Death Eaters. But ordinary wizards can’t just shower themselves in magically-created luxury. If they could, then Xenophilius Lovegood, for instance, could just conjure a more efficient printing press. Fred and George could wave their wands and instantly conjure their pranks, rather than spending years developing the recipes. Aberforth Dumbledore could wave his wand and instantly make his pub warm, clean, and a lot bigger.
Madam Pomfrey is the school nurse, and she can do a lot, but she can’t do everything. Wizards still need to specialize. Some go into medicine or research; some go into hospitality; some go into literature or journalism; some go into retail or manufacturing; some go into white-collar services like law and accounting. It’s easy to buy the surface-level argument that there are no jobs in the wizarding world, but look deeper: name an ordinary Muggle job, and there’s a good chance that there’s an equivalent job in the wizarding world.
I’ll prove it. I went to www.careerplanner.com, which has a list of over 12,000 different jobs. I generated a random letter — “H” — and found 328 jobs that started with the letter H. A random number generator gave me the number 246, which is something called “hose cutter, hand.”
I’m not entirely sure what that is; I assume it means someone who cuts hoses by hand. So let’s take this over to the wizarding world. What does a wizarding family do if they want a garden hose? Maybe they conjure it — but they have no idea of the complexity of the material and the connectors on either end, so that might be difficult. Maybe they don’t want a hose at all, but rather a magical irrigation system that will automatically keep their garden watered. Either way, since this family likely has no idea how irrigation works, there’s a good chance they need to go to a specialist who can tell them what they need, and who can get what they need manufactured and installed, which of course might take even more employees. There’s probably not a witch or wizard literally sitting there cutting up hoses by hand, but there’s no reason why the wizarding world can’t have irrigation specialists — or interior designers, or wedding planners, or artisanal blanket weavers, or home security experts, or any of the many, many careers that exist. Even wizards need to specialize, which means that even though we might not see them, there are a lot of different career paths to choose from.
Anyway, moving on (can you believe it?)...Harry puts on his pajamas with Ron helping him, and Rowling specifically notes that it takes a while to shove the “rubbery, boneless arm” into one of the sleeves. I can’t help but wonder what the atmosphere at this moment was like. All three members of the trio are pretty mature for their age, since they’re being written by an adult, but still, as two twelve-year-old boys, I’m surprised Harry and Ron didn’t have more fun with this. There are definitely some pranks they could have played: have Ron swing Harry’s hand out for someone else to shake, for instance, then watch their expression as they realize they’re shaking a hand with no bones. At the very least, they probably could have supremely grossed out Hermione. On the other hand, maybe they absolutely weren’t feeling it, and the atmosphere as Ron helped Harry stuff his arm into his sleeve was more like that scene from The King of Queens when Doug has to help pick Arthur up after he gets stuck between the wall and the toilet.
Also, while Madam Pomfrey is limited, as we’ve explored, you’d think this would be the one thing she would insist on doing: getting Harry into a new set of clothes. Instead, she basically hands two twelve-year-olds, one of whom has a rubbery, boneless arm, a pair of pajamas and basically says “all yours!” She knows that Ron is going to help Harry — I have to think that if Harry was alone, she wouldn’t just hand him a pair of pajamas and walk away — but still: she’s entrusting a pair of twelve-year-old boys with getting the one of them who just lost all the bones in his arm dressed and ready for bone regrowth? Seems like the kind of thing that, if the boys felt like it, could lead to some absolute mayhem. If this had been Fred and George, for instance, you can bet that they wouldn’t have sat there quietly and put on pajamas when Madam Pomfrey left them alone with a boneless arm.
Also notably, you can sort of see that this is the moment when Hermione starts doubting Lockhart. She still rationalizes and defends him — “anyone can make a mistake, and it doesn’t hurt anymore, does it, Harry?” — but that’s such nonsense Hermione, a smart person, clearly doesn’t believe her own words. Hermione remains a fan of Lockhart for a lot more of the book — remember, she seems to be one of the people who sends him a Valentine’s Day card, and she keeps a get-well card from him under her pillow — but that’s a crush talking, not Hermione’s appreciation for his prodigious magical abilities that previously might have seemed rational. She’s still harboring an interest in him maybe even into book five, when the trio runs into him at St. Mungo’s, but that’s based on nothing but twelve-year-old memories. It’s strange, when you think about it, that Hermione can probably never feel the way Harry and Ron do towards Lockhart, since she wasn’t with them when they prevented him from running away then watched his attempt to sabotage them with a memory charm backfire. She can still be stuck on Lockhart.
Madam Pomfrey comes over, holding a big bottle of “Skele-Gro.” I want to emphasize this, because it reinforces my point from earlier. This isn’t a bone potion that Madam Pomfrey can conjure or brew herself. It’s not even some sort of bespoke potion hand-brewed for Madam Pomfrey by an old man who lives in the woods surrounded by potions ingredients; if it was, it would be labeled “a draught for the regrowth of bone matter,” or something like that. This is branded. It’s a mass-market corporate pharmaceutical product. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were commercials for Skele-Gro with the official drug name in parentheses and a lengthy list of potential side effects in small print.
So what does that tell us about the company that manufactures Skele-Gro? It probably has a board of directors and chief officers. A research and development division. A large sales team. A legal department. Graphic designers, advertising strategists, and copywriters. Accountants. Human Resources personnel. Customer Service. Packaging and delivery. Not to mention the factory-type workers who actually make the various products, and the bottles, and the labels, and the packaging.
Look at analogous companies in the muggle world. Pfizer and Merck each have more than 70,000 employees; Johnson and Johnson has more than 130,000. Maybe Skele-Gro’s parent company is smaller, and maybe magic can eliminate some of the work that might require new hires for muggles, but it still has to be a pretty big company if it has widely recognizable products for retail sale. That’s a lot of jobs for wizards.
Anyway, Harry takes the Skele-Gro and it’s quite unpleasant. You’d think they could pair it with some sort of painkiller, or even anesthesia, so that Harry could sleep through all the bone regrowth, but then again, he needs to wake up to hear the whispered conversation early the next morning as Dumbledore and McGonagall bring Colin Creevey to the hospital wing, so thank God Madam Pomfrey didn’t give him anything to put him out. Maybe it was a conversation with Dumbledore: “Poppy, the next time Potter comes in, make sure you give him something that will keep him overnight, but I want him to wake up the second he hears anyone coming in whispering in hushed tones.”
We don’t get that yet, though; the page ends with Madam Pomfrey tut-tutting about dangerous sports and inept teachers, and ends not only on an incomplete word, but on a hyphen. Ugh. The worst. We’ll check in on Harry’s recovery later. All we can say for certain is that it would have been a lot easier with the Tutshill Tornadoes’ team orthopedist.