Sector General - Challenges of Inter-species Medicine

Challenges of Inter-species Medicine

Sector General was founded to promote inter-species harmony, and therefore all medical staff must be prepared to treat beings with very different physiologies and behavior patterns, and sometimes with environmental requirements that would be lethal to staff without suitable protection. The hospital uses a four-letter system to assign patients to wards that provide suitable environments, a classification technique used earlier by E. E. "Doc" Smith's Children of the Lens. White's Star Healer introduces the classification "FOKT", which is regarded as an in-joke on the name of the Glasgow science fiction club Friends of Kilgore Trout.

When necessary physicians, surgeons and pathologists download information about patients' species into their minds from "Educator tapes", recordings of the memories of great practitioners in the appropriate species. However, in addition to medical knowledge, the educator tapes also capture the personalities of the medical experts who recorded them. Thus having an educator tape active threatens the recipient with multiple personality disorder. The new personality is from a vastly different species, often with very different behavior codes and sexual preferences, and, to make matters worse, the donors were often very dominant personalities. The mildest symptom of such conflicts is a running gag in which users of these tapes are often seen in the Sector General's cafeteria, eating a bland-looking sandwich with closed eyes. On the other hand the risk of finding members of other species sexually attractive is a serious concern.

Junior doctors usually have these acquired memories erased as soon as possible. However as a doctor rises up through the hospital hierarchy, and if its mind proves to be sufficiently stable, it may find itself the permanent recipient of one or more tapes. Diagnosticians, the medical elite of Sector General, can have as many as ten different tapes active at one time, as they may have to supervise treatment of many species at the same time.

In the case of species with two permanent sexes, including but not limited to Earth-humans, the stories state that females are psychologically incapable of allowing their psyches to be violated to the extent required by the educator tapes. However in one of the later books a very assertive non-human female character accidentally acquires several sets of memories which cannot be erased, and adjusts to this with relative ease.