You've concentrated solely on how stage magic isn't really magic.

How do you explain what has happened to actual, working magic like medicine, oriental martial arts, and chemistry?

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You've concentrated solely on how stage magic isn't really magic.

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No, I've also focused on the fact that people generally continue to use words they are accustomed to using to describe something unless there is an incentive to change. Tradition!

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How do you explain what has happened to actual, working magic like medicine, oriental martial arts, and chemistry?

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Good question. Here's my theory:

Now, in the case of a witch doctor who gives someone a magical herb that relieves pain, his "magic" is what we call "medicine."

But why do we call it medicine instead of magic when the medical doctor gives us codeine and the pain goes away?

It is not because we laymen understand the science behind codeine any more than the witch doctor's patients understand the magic behind chewing an herb. It is because our culture and language eveloved in such a way as to make the terminology of science primary in our language.

Why? I think the answer is found in the interaction of the development of science and Christianity (actually, an idea found in Judaism that carried over into Christianity.)

Although there were scientific principles discovered long before and in other places, the scientific worldview (that is, the idea that science could explain everything about the natural world, and the development of the scientific method) seems to have begun developing in Europe after the fall of Constatinople in 1453. (This is not meant to denigrate other cultures; it is simply a fact that science took hold in Europe -- which at the time was behind China and the Islamic world, scientifically -- and thereafter developed more quickly than it had anywhere else. The reasons for this are various -- see the excellent book Guns, Germs, and Steel.)

So science is developing in Europe, which happens to be dominated by the Christian religion. And although Christianity's belief system allowed for the existence of magic, the practice of magic was forbidden as being evil.

If you were a scientist, it was smart to describe your discoveries in non-magical terms. When witchcraft carries the death penalty, you don't want to be a witch doctor. Being a medical doctor is much safer.

Eventually, thanks in large part to scientific advancement, the European nations became the dominant nations of the world. (Again, no disrespect inteded for other cultures. This is merely historical fact.)

And, in encountering other cultures, the European scientific viewpoint spread to explain actual, working magic (such as medicine and chemistry), replacing the terminology of magic with the terminology of science. (I don't know anything about oriental martial arts magic, so I cannot comment on it.)

That is a good point, but it brings up an interesting corollary.

Would these magical technologies have become demystified if not for 'science'?

There are strong advantages that accrue to the weilder of arcane knowledge, after all. It is rarely in the perceived interest of anyone holding arcane knowledge to demystify it for the masses.

Look at the way many doctors practice medicine today...despite the stated ethics of 'informed consent' and so forth. Heck, look at the way Wall Street does business, despite some pretty stringent laws on the subject.

But this is of course all a side argument. The issue is not whether the particular word 'magic' will be used (except in the case of a society in our future discovering 'magical' abilities...in which case I think we both agree the word 'magic' wouldn't be used). And of course, most HF takes place in distant worlds where English is not spoken at all (often this is explicit, such as when the writer has invented words that supposedly come from 'ancient Barbookian' or whatever).

As someone or other already pointed out, techne used to be a term that could be used for magic. Our modern word is so divorced from the idea of magic that most people actively resist the idea that magic would require technology (or even technique).

If a society developed some technology that had previously had very mystical overtones, and for whatever reason demystified it, would their 'modern' word for that technology still appropriately translate as 'magic'?

By that standard, we should translate ancient texts on math using the word 'magic' a lot to replace current math terms.