Unable to be healed; incurable or beyond recovery from illness or injury.
From Old English 'hæl' (health, wholeness) plus '-less' (lacking). An archaic or literary term describing conditions resistant to treatment, common in older medical or poetic writing.
Before antibiotics, many infections were genuinely 'healless'—the diagnosis was a death sentence—which is why the discovery of penicillin in 1928 seemed like actual magic to desperate patients!
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