Basic Information
A healer is, strange to say, a character who provides healing of some kind to others. There is also some implication of a less mechanistic approach than might be suggested by "conventional medicine", so much as the ideas of soldier and warrior are sometimes thought to oppose one another, so the idea of physician and healer might be said to do so. In modern terms, anyone describing themselves as a "healer" probably doesn't have a medical licence.
That leaves us the entirety of alternative medicine to consider, plus anything which could be considered supernatural (whether theurgy or magic) and probably anyone pre-scientific stands a good chance of being more a healer than a doctor, whatever their job title (so including the local cunning man or wise woman). The chirurge and biothaumaturge tend to roll the log back in the other direction: their work is supernatural in tone, but possibly not always that fastidious about the outcomes for their subjects.
There are also the fields of mental and spiritual healing (whether they are regarded separately or not) and so various religious and quasi-religious figures can also find their way into this category. Frankly many of those might well be involved in corporeal medicine as well and might not separate that from mental and spiritual healing either (which might be considered holistic therapy … truly there is nothing new under the sun).
Sources
Game and Story Use
- Most RPG characters will need a lot of healing, one way or the other, and will need access to someone who can supply it, whether black market doctor, healbot cleric or leech-flinging barber-surgeon.