Wizard diseases

(long ago) Disease, in general, was a lot more rampant and likely to kill you.  Yeah, wizards have the capacity to recover from things, but they don’t have any particular increased resistance to contracting a disease.  They just come back from it in better shape than regular folks.  For example, if you get a good case of pneumonia (like I did), you’ve got a reduced capacity to resist subsequent similar infections.  And that’s it.  In fact, having gotten pneumonia once gives you a pretty darn big mathematical probability that you’re going to die of pneumonia in the future.  (Pneumonia being one of the main things that actually does the killing when you’ve got cancer or other serious medical issues.)  Wizards don’t face that same danger.  If they beat it, they beat it, and it isn’t of any more consequence than getting over a cold.
But even so, before antibiotics, wizards were as worried about disease as everyone else was.  And a great way to not get diseases was to STAY HOME.  Which most of them did.


Info on Wizard healing (http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,15416.msg728651.html#msg728651) + other wizardly limitations