Is there a doctor in the house?

I must say that some of my Victorian religious novelists demonstrate a certain...well...innocence (or maybe cheerful nonchalance) about bodily trauma.  In August, I admitted to feeling some bemusement after a character toppled out of a high tower onto an unforgiving beach below, then survived being picked up and toted off before dying several weeks later of an unrelated ailment.  This chain of events did seem a trifle problematic; after all,  if you topple out of a high tower onto a stony beach, you usually wind up with multiple fractures and severe internal injuries.  Of course, the stones could have been made out of papier-mâché, I suppose, but the novelist neglected to supply any information on that score.

This evening, I finished a Catholic historical novel set during the Elizabethan period, Cecilia Mary Caddell's Wild Times: A Tale of the Days of Queen Elizabeth (1865).  In the course of the novel's plot, a pair of brothers are both tortured.  One is racked multiple times over the course of a month; the other, even more gruesomely, is hanged from the wrists:

The wrists were bound with cords and fastened to pegs, placed so high above the head that the entire weight of the body necessarily depended on them; and as the victim was tall and the apartment low, his legs had been forcibly bent backwards and tied round the thighs in order that he might hang more completely suspended [...] The veins in his forehead were swollen thick as ropes, his tongue protuding black and hard in the agony of a thirst than which none greater had been endured since the days of Calvary, and the whole form was so still and rigid that Hugh might have deemed him already dead, if an almost imperceptible quiver of the eyelids as he entered the room had not warned him he was recognised.  (181)

Nevertheless, three days later, both brothers can cheerfully walk into court to be tried for treason, having apparently suffered no lasting or even visible consequences from their violent sufferings.  Caddell doesn't even suggest that we're seeing an instance of miraculous healing.  This seems to me to be rather overly optimistic, somehow.