Regrowing limbs (was: What other curse scar?)

[Patricia Bullington-McGuire]

No: HPFGUIDX 60148

On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, finwitch wrote:

> And speaking of Moody - any ideas on what kind of benefit his 
> artificial foot gives him? Or is it just that he's too paranoid to 
> drink a leg-grower and can't brew one himself? His magical eye, at 
> least, is a benefit beyond having a new eye...

I wouldn't put it past Moody to find some way to make the artificial leg a
powerful magical object.  However, I'm not sure it's possible to regrow an
entire missing limb.  The fact that the old Care of Magical Creatures
teacher (pre-Hagrid) retired "to spend more time with his remaining limbs"  
suggests that regrowing a limb is not commonly or easily done.  It's
always seemed odd to me that the old teacher couldn't just regrow his
missing limbs but Harry *could* regrow all the bones in one limb (his arm)
overnight with Skele-Gro, but that's the way JKR wrote it.

----
Patricia Bullington-McGuire	<patricia at obscure.org>

The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered
three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical, and the
purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each
nonexisted in an entirely different way ... 
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"