How long does healing wounds with the medicine aptitude take?

Question

The rules mention that healing wind takes ~5 minutes, but it doesn't define how long healing wounds takes. Does that mean it only takes a single action? Can you just spend action after action decreasing the severity of wounds?

Healin’ Wind: On a Foolproof (3) medicine roll of any kind (including a default roll from someone who couldn’t tell one end of a scalpel from another), someone can bandage scrapes or give the sufferer some water to eliminate all Wind. The hero can even do this for himself in a pinch. This takes about five minutes. Otherwise your hero gets his Wind back at the rate of 1 per minute.

Healin’ Wounds: Real wounds are trickier. A medicine roll can be made for an attempt to offer aid to someone up to one hour after an injury. A character with the medicine: general Aptitude can heal light and heavy wounds. Only a sawbones with medicine: surgery can heal more severe wounds. The doctor has to roll once for each wounded area. If successful, the roll reduces the area’s wounds by one level. The TN depends on the wound level. Maimed limbs cannot be healed by normal means, but you can still try to stop the bleeding. After the “golden hour” has passed, a wound can only be healed by time or certain arcane processes. Doctors really can’t do a whole lot for a broken bone that’s surrounded by swollen tissue or a gash that’s already started to heal on it’s own. Still, you have to take what’s available.

Answer 1

You only get one roll.

I'm going to add emphasis to parts of the text you quoted.

Real wounds are trickier. A medicine roll can be made for an attempt to offer aid to someone up to one hour after an injury. A character with the medicine: general Aptitude can heal light and heavy wounds. Only a sawbones with medicine: surgery can heal more severe wounds. The doctor has to roll once for each wounded area. If successful, the roll reduces the area’s wounds by one level. The TN depends on the wound level. Maimed limbs cannot be healed by normal means, but you can still try to stop the bleeding. After the “golden hour” has passed, a wound can only be healed by time or certain arcane processes. Doctors really can’t do a whole lot for a broken bone that’s surrounded by swollen tissue or a gash that’s already started to heal on it’s own. Still, you have to take what’s available.

Deadlands Classic is a horror game set in the late 19th century, and surgery and medical practice generally are neither reliable nor safe. The text emphasizes in multiple places how impotent doctors are to handle most severe injury. As a result, I think the intent is that when they say "a medicine roll" and "an attempt," they mean just one. The effective ways of dealing with wounds are spending chips to prevent them or using magical healing. Everything else is about promoting an environment where wounds can do you in. Surgery makes things survivable long enough that natural healing can take its course.

Your question is "how long does it take?" I think the answer there is based on the fiction — how long does surgery take generally? Somewhere between minutes and hours. The key thing I want to impart is that the idea that you can spend "action after action reducing wounds" is a no-go.

Answer 2

We at first handled it in a way that it takes "until your hour is up" or something thats appropriate to the wounds and wounded when "until the hour is up" seemed unreasonably long.

The Idea behind that was that a doc would spend as much time as he could to take care of the patient.

I didn't find anything in the book, so I just cooked the rules myself :)

After my players complained about the rule above, I changed the rules to this:

Any Medic can attempt to heal five heavy OR ten light wounds within an hour.

A Surgeon can also attempt to treat two wounds of any state additionally.

So tending to more than one person became tricky, but unfortunately the group broke soon after so I can't say if that works well.