Abstract
Humans generally prefer to be healthy and without pain. We can increase the odds of staying that way by eating proper amounts of nutritious foods, getting enough exercise, and not engaging in optional behavior that is likely to harm us. Nonetheless we cannot entirely avoid illness or injury, and barring major medical advances we will all ultimately age and die.
As to diseases make a habit of two things—to help, or at least, to do no harm.
Hippocrates
Epidemics
HUMANOID. Serial No. 81-H-B-27. The Perfect Mechanical. “To Serve and Obey, and Guard Men from Harm.”
Jack Williamson
“With Folded Hands” (1947)
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Notes
- 1.
The drama of the scene in which Commander Pavel Chekov and Captain Clark Terrell are “infected” by the alien organisms can overpower the biological questions it raises about how exactly those “worms” actually exert their will-numbing effects on their hosts. Once placed in the latter’s external auditory canals, do those creatures whisper Khan’s commands to the Starfleet officers? Less facetiously, do they secrete a substance that could reduce a human’s ability to think for himself? Hopefully they do not actually burrow directly into the victim’s brain. This would not only require rupturing the tympanic membrane (“eardrum”) and destroying the delicate anatomical structures in the middle and inner ears, leaving the individual deaf on that side, but would also cause significant, irreversible damage to the cerebral cortex. The worm would also have to traverse a comparatively long distance through that cortex to presumably reach one or both frontal lobes, the parts of the brain most associated with volitional activity. Maybe it’s better not to think too deeply about such things and just enjoy the movie…
- 2.
My story “The Human Touch” ( Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 1998) does, for satiric purposes, include characters with medical problems such as hemorrhoids and pediculosis pubis (infestation of pubic hair by lice). However, I doubt these particular diseases will catch on as popular ones in other science fiction.
- 3.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 1996
- 4.
However, there are exceptions to this. The novel Mars Crossing (2000) by Geoffrey A. Landis describes an expedition to Mars that ultimately leads to disaster when a single crewmember develops what is said to be a case of this typically nonfatal fungal infection. The fungus not only spreads to and sickens the spacecraft’s other members but only starts to grow on vital internal parts of the craft itself. Ultimately the fungus infiltrates the latter’s fuel-controller electronics, causing a short circuit that makes the spacecraft explode, killing the entire crew. In this particular case, on balance it actually would have been “better” and less dramatic for an astronaut to “only” have a heart attack…
- 5.
This is something characters encountered in the fantasy role-playing game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim who have “taken an arrow to the knee” know all too well.
- 6.
A systemic artery is one that ultimately originates from the left ventricle, as opposed to the “pulmonary” arteries that arise from the right ventricle and pass through the lungs.
- 7.
Hopefully to no one’s surprise, these anatomic details render the “manual cardiotomy” performed on someone who probably did not sign a consent form for the procedure depicted in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) “magical” rather than “medical” in its level of realism. I also suspect that the “surgeon” doing the procedure may have been practicing medicine without a license, and he certainly did not use standard sterile technique for the operation. However, a conventionally trained cardiothoracic surgeon might well admire that character’s efficiency in performing the surgery.
- 8.
See Chap. 6 for more about the effects of radiation.
- 9.
Not to be confused with the 1997 science fiction film with that same title.
- 10.
My reaction to reading this physician’s space opera adventures and the perks of being a “Soldier of Light” in the Universal Medical Society is to ask, “Where do I send my dues to join the UMS?” While the American College of Cardiology and other medical organizations I belong to are certainly fine too, they do not yet offer interstellar career opportunities comparable to the ones that futuristic professional group does.
- 11.
The challenges involved with actually creating an autodoc are described in Chap. 5.
- 12.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July 1994.
- 13.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 1996.
- 14.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January 1998.
- 15.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March 2002.
- 16.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 2010.
- 17.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2010.
- 18.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 1998.
- 19.
Overall, a thrombus (blood clot) blocking an artery is more likely to damage or destroy tissue it provides blood than one in a vein. If even a very small thrombus in an artery breaks off into the bloodstream and becomes an “embolus” it can injure an organ by occluding a smaller artery “downstream” (e.g. causing a stroke if that artery supplies blood to the brain). A similarly sized embolus in a vein will likely pass through the right side of the heart and block off a small branch of the pulmonary artery—not a good thing, but generally less significant than what an arterial embolus could do.
- 20.
See Chap. 8 for more about this issue.
- 21.
I will mention in passing that the untimely end of the 7th Doctor at the hands of a cardiologist understandably unfamiliar with his (by terrestrial though not Gallifreyan standards) distinctive cardiovascular system is a plausible plot device in the 1996 Doctor Who movie. However, I will refrain from filling many paragraphs about the myriad questionable (to put it mildly) details about how medicine is otherwise depicted and practiced in that presentation.
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Stratmann, H. (2016). Hurting and Healing Characters. In: Using Medicine in Science Fiction. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16015-3_2
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