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[MuonDecay]

Expanding on the medic side of this, there could be medicinal plants. 

Opium comes to mind.  Let the farmers make raw opium and then the alchemist can make laudanum or extract morphine or something (use dwarven rum in a reaction, etc).  Dwarves in pain could use a capsule of it and let the pain go away... for a while.  When they use a lot of opium because they're stuck hauling junk from one end of the world to the other and the wounds just cannot heal, we get the line:  "Urist McJunkie needs [opium|laudanum|horse] to get through the working day."

Urist McJunkie cancels Store Item in Stockpile: Getting fix.

Pain management, painkillers, drugs, and addiction are a long throw from basic medicine and a hell of a more complicated thing to develop, program, and balance.

There's also the issue of whether or not Toady wants to even go there. Were I in that position I'd prefer not to just because all of the whining people would do about it.

Speaking as a pragmatist, on a 1-10 scale of complexity as an addition, anything related to opium and all its associated facets is at least 5 points higher than basic medicine, and that's assuming it's even going to have any proportional benefit to the players to justify the complicated effort to implement it.

There are a lot of things that would be neat to see in the game, but how many of them are going to improve the gameplay so much that it's worth spending many hours of time to implement them and iron out the details? Treating wounds and resolving the clutter of various "xxx covering" scores much higher, in that respect.

[Omega2]

Baths are interesting. I'd like to have them, if you could also make them public (build a water tank and designate a public bath out of it). Dwarves should get happy thoughts out of it, of course.

Also, more competent medics is something we really need. Right now, having a force of anything but marksdwarves is really inefficient because of the high casualty/wound rate of melee fighters. If someone is wounded in combat or sparring, you can count on him to be out for at least a season, if not crippled for the rest of his life.

Now, something that would do the trick while that isn't implemented, is having dwarves do spring cleaning. A new year comes and all the grime, blood, slime, vomit and mud on the walls and clothes goes away. I know refuse and blood/vomit smears left outside will vanish in a year, but I haven't checked if stains on other things will go away, too.

[RavingManiac]

Hmm....

If we are to have any sort of medicine besides painkillers, then we need diseases.

That shouldn't be too hard to do actually, considering that in the 2D version, flaming dwarves would set nearby creatures on fire. If you have something that works like this except without spreading to inanimate objects or  instantly killing the dwarf, then you already have a basic disease.

Make it do damage to specific internal organs depending on the type of disease. Polio would break the spine, flu would bruise the throat and lungs and so on.

[Techhead]

Old world deseases, ideally.
In addition to polio and influensia which were discovered relatively recently, there is also leprosy, tubercolosis, smallpox, typhoid, and malaria.

[Jamuk]

Urist McDwarf has been afflicted with the black plague!!

[Royal Surveyor]

Don't forget the great old, too, like dropsy, pleurasy, etc.  Oh, and gout.  Can't forget gout, for the dwarves who eat nothing but meat.

However, this would probably be difficult to implement, as stated earlier, and aside from magic, there's little from the old world that one could do for medicating the problem.  Again, there's painkillers, and most of them would actually have been effective against dysentery or dysenteric effects of diseases.

As for the black plague, that was a vermin-borne disease in real life, but in Europe, they thought that by killing cats (Satan's helpers) they could defeat the plague.  If DF is heavily magic based, and it's not a vermin-borne illness here, then it would finally give me a real good excuse to go on a cat butchering rampage.

Leprosy would be very interesting, as it causes neuropahty, so Urist would constantly be banging his toes into things and not noticing.  Suddenly, there'd be yellow, red, and dark grey wounds developing.

[penguinofhonor]

Leprosy would be very interesting, as it causes neuropahty, so Urist would constantly be banging his toes into things and not noticing.  Suddenly, there'd be yellow, red, and dark grey wounds developing.

Of course, some people wouldn't notice until there were dwarf limbs scattered all over the place. Yay, leprosy!

[Techhead]

Of course, in a medieval-fantasty setting, the diseases should obviously have more fantasy-like causes. Quarantine was know to be effective in medival era and before, so just make it a proximity-based plauge effect. Cures would be homeopathic, usually plant or animal extracts, and treatment would probably involve a dwarf cleaning sores.

Also, who doesn't love the idea of throwing migrants in a leper colony until thier limbs fall off.