Many have likened maledictology to medicine and the healing arts. They are both, in essence, the study of harm and how it can be repaired (or perhaps exacerbated if ethics aren't your forte). Many institutions throughout the realms had gone a step further and included aspects of the school alongside more common classes, because it was always useful to understand the morphology of certain hexes, and how their affliction affected the physiology of different magical beings. A Bane of Shivering Penance would look very different to a Jotun versus a Salamander Spirit, and one of them was likely to suffer greater harm from it.
Sometimes the specific effects were completely universal, which made them easier to diagnose if not necessarily cure. Usually those hexes targeted the more metaphysical c
