Heroes: Healing

Healing is the ability to cause other individuals to heal injuries at an increased rate, resulting in complete recovery in a matter of seconds.

Characters
 Confirmed 
 * Daniel Linderman is the first character to demonstrate this ability.
 * Ishi Nakamura also demonstrated this ability.

Daniel Linderman
Linderman has demonstrated the ability to completely heal seriosu injuries including a bullet wound that went all the way through a man's abdomen, a broken jaw, and a spinal injury that had left Heidi Petrelli's legs paralyzed for six months. He was also able to heal the damage caused by his mother's liver cancer, but it is unclear whether he fully "cured" the disease.

It is not currently known if Linderman could have healed Dallas's injury if the bulle twas still in the wound. It is also not known if he can heal his own injuries.

During the Vietnam War, Linderman seemed to need to be in physical contact with the sick or injured person--touching the wound, if possible--for at least several seconds to cause healing. By 2006, he appears to be able to initiate healing with brief contact and then continue merely by holding his hand close to the subject. When healing Heidi's spinal injury, he only touched her hand, but he did hold it for several seconds.

By his own admission, Linderman cannot "bring back the dead". This apparently means that he cannot heal someone who is clinically dead, even if they have only been dead a short time. Specifically, although none of them had been dead for more than a few minutes, he could not revive members of his special operations unit who were killed in an ambush, nor could he revive Au Co. He also seems unable to cure illnesses caused by viruses and/or bacteria, otherwise he would have been able to cure Molly Walker without the assistance of Mohinder Suresh.

Linderman can heal the brain damage caused by telepathic attacks that alter a person's behavior or memory, effectively restoring the person's original memories and personality.

Linderman's healing abilities are not restricted to human beings or even animals; he seems to be able to repair damage to any living thing.

Ishi Nakamura
Ishi Nakamura was apparently unable to use her ability to heal whatever condition was killing her. It is unclear if this means that healers cannot heal their own injuries or if Ishi's condition was beyond all healing. An alternative possiblity is that her disease was caused by a pathogen, in which case the limitation on Linderman's ability mentioned above could apply here.

Ishi's apparent preferred gesture was that of a kiss, due to her affection for her son and for her dove, but she presumably has the same physical contact requirements as Linderman.

Though she was unsure, Ishi was able to restore more than a decade's worth of her son's memories after Arthur Petrelli's attack.