Elvish Medicine?

[Kalimac]

Just another minor consideration - the Elves are generally acknowledged to be very good at healing and medicine and so forth (for example, Elrond curing Frodo of his Weathertop wound, or at least ameliorating it if not fully curing it). In the movie Aragorn calls it "Elvish medicine" but I cannot remember for sure whether that particular phrase was in the books or not. Anyway, did the Elves use straight-up medicines or did they effect their cures more spiritually? (Healing the soul, and the body with it - something like that). The reason I'm asking is that since Elves are made for immortality and do not get sick nor die of anything except violence and "declining" - which isn't really a germ-carried illness - why would they develop medicines or cures for illnesses which they never got?

One possibility I thought of was that it may have started when Elves and Men were allied; since men could be wounded and die of illnesses and infections, the Elves might have decided to take advantage of their thousands of years of personal experience with studying herbology and so forth to develop some cures for their friends. This seems a little lacking for some reason, though. Does anyone have any ideas? (Or maybe a passage in Tolkien's writings that I haven't spotted yet? [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]). Thank you!