Wound Closure
(Necromancy)

Range:  0
Components:  V, S
Duration:  Permanent
Casting Time:  5
Area of Effect:  Creature touched
Saving Throw:  None

This spell closes the wounds of the recipient to prevent bleeding and infection, incidentally curing 1d4 points of damage. All of the victim's wounds will be closed by a single casting, but further application is possible to increase the healing effect. The spell can be used on corpses to disguise the cause of death, but it does not work on non-corporeal or extra-planar entities.
Note: a recent posting suggested that wizards should be able to cast healing spells using 1d6 instead of 1d8. I believe the above spell description shows my opposition to that approach (see also the Dungeon Master's Guide, page 43), unless you intend to do away with priests as a PC class. From a game mechanics standpoint, such an approach would destroy the balance between priest and wizard, but there is a campaign background reason as well: pseudo-medieval medical knowledge would be atrocious. A priest's healing is a gift from God or the gods, relatively omniscient and omnipotent fellows, but magical curing would depend upon the wizard's understanding of the body and its functions. Thus you might find a wizard who can pull the edges of a wound back together, as described above, but you could not find one who could stimulate the replication of tissue of various injured organs, insure an increased blood supply to the affected regions, metabolise fat and increase respiration to enrich said blood, etc. You certainly could not find a wizard to cure diseases before any microbes are discovered.

