We’ve all been there. As soon as one inadvertently plants an X-Acto knife in one’s own forearm or bangs one’s head HARD on a cupboard, one is apt to muse that “medical attention would not be entirely unwelcome at this juncture.” Science fiction characters are no different. No surprise, then, that science fiction and fantasy often feature doctors, nurses, and other healers.
Consider these five SFF works about healing.
Hospital Station by James White (1962)
Sector 12 General Hospital is supported by hundreds of civilized worlds. The deep space hospital caters to every known intelligent species, regardless of shape, composition, biochemistry, or radioactivity. Indeed, Sector General is prepared to heal even unknown species.
Hospital Station is a collection of stories/case histories from the early years of Sector General’s existence. Staff are still working out how best to tackle the Herculean task with which they have been entrusted. Administration is still determining to which roles staff is best suited. The stakes are high; mistakes will cost lives.
I am surprised (but only a little) that given the popularity of medical shows, Sector General (and Murray Leinster’s Med Ship series) did not spawn a whole subgenre of medical SF on the scale of MilSF. Or perhaps it is just that nobody has set out to promote such a subgenre… yet.
Healer by F. Paul Wilson (1976)
Eluding raiders on a backwater splinter world, Steven Dalt ducks into a cave. He is immediately set upon by an alaret, a cave-dwelling creature for which this planet is notorious. Dalt’s prospects look grim: “of every thousand struck down (by alarets), nine hundred and ninety-nine will die.”
One in a thousand humans can form a symbiotic relationship with the alaret. Dalt is one such. Together, Dalt and his new companion Pard have become a quasi-immortal being. Together, they have remarkable powers of telepathy. These powers will be invaluable and irreplaceable in the treatment of the victims of the mysterious and common condition known as “horrors”… provided Dalt can resist the ennui that comes with endless life.
It’s probably for the best that Dalt never reveals that alarets have a tenth of a percent chance of turning a human into an immortal. If he had, the animals would have been driven extinct by desperate sick and elderly people.
The Healer’s War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1988)
Vietnam War-era military nurse Lt. Kitty McCulley manages to convince Vietnamese holy man Cao Van Xe to temporarily entrust her with his precious medallion while he undergoes surgery. As she is a sensible, modern woman, it would not occur to Kitty that the artifact might be magical, nor that it could imbue her with healing powers beyond mortal ken. But it does.
Healing powers are as much a burden as gift. Kitty cannot be sure she has not cracked under wartime stress. If she is still sane, she is not sure how best to use her new abilities. Even should she gain full command of such abilities, they may not be enough to deal with her latest, most serious challenge: a racist officer determined to rid the wards of all of Kitty’s Vietnamese patients.
Eldrie the Healer by Claudia J. Edwards (1989)
Life as a royal bastard is unrewarding. Eldrie leaves her native Maritiene, hoping to find a new life as a healer in some distant land. The war-torn Republic seemed like a good option—there is nothing like a civil war to produce patients in dire need of medical attention.
The small flaw in this otherwise perfect plan was that to heal members of one faction is to be seen as an enemy of the other. Healing everyone leads to both sides seeing her as an enemy. When offered an alliance of mutual protection by barbarian Huard, Eldrie accepts…only to discover she should have enquired more closely about Huard’s true motivations.
This book was intended to be part of an ongoing series. As far as I know, this was the only volume. I note that publisher Pageant Books vanished after 1989, which could well be the reason subsequent volumes did not appear. Readers should be aware some plot threads are not resolved.
The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia (2022)
Having fled Dilmun for the comparative safety of the Free Democratic City-State of Qilwa, Firuz has difficulty finding a clinic job; they don’t have the credentials required. Finally they find employment at Kofi’s clinic. Firuz prudently informs their new boss only that they do structuralist magic. Best not to reveal their skill with blood magic.
Caution proves prudent. Blood magicians are being abducted, to what fate none can say. Blood magicians are a popular scapegoat for many ills and the authorities are not inclined to investigate closely. This is a foolish decision on their part, as blood magicians are uniquely qualified to deal with the latest plague sweeping the city. Firuz could cure the victims… but might pay a heavy price if they reveal that they’re a blood magician.
Modern readers may find it difficult to believe that a democratic state (well, nominally so) could be so inept at dealing with a medical crisis like the bruising plague. What is the point of having a state if it cannot deal with national-level crisis?
While MedSF is probably not common enough to warrant subgenre status, there are enough eligible works that I had to leave many off this list of five. Perhaps I missed one or more of your favorites. If so, feel free to mention them in comments.
Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre, Machine by Elizabeth Bear.
+100 for Dreamsnake, I don’t know what I was expecting from it but it was so much better. Weird and Beautiful
Elsewhere, someone mentioned RPG clerics. The most annoying ttrpg healer I’ve encountered was the Chalana Arroy healer in the Runequest starter box solo adventure, who kept cramming my character’s soul back into her shattered body each time she got killed [1], rather than letting her slink off to the afterlife.
1: The first time involved taking two arrows to the head, for a total of 36 HP. Her head had 4 HP.
Chalana Arroy gets things wrong. Everyone knows when you need a healer in Glorantha you get yourself a Xiola Umbar. She will heal you, smack you gently on the head when you get things wrong (gently for a Troll), and give you a cookie before healing you again from the headsmack!
I was in a long running D&D campaign and there was a cult called The Dead Stay Dead. Not only were they vicious killed of vampires, zombies, skeletons, and the like, they also would hunt down and kill anyone who had been resurrected. Made for an interesting twist and made us very careful not to die–unless you were tired of the character and wanted to roll up a new one.
In RuneQuest, the death god Humakt is fussy about the whole dead vs alive deal. Devout Humakti sometimes are geased to eshew resurrection, as I recall, and while I don’t remember devotees reinhuming the former dead, it would be in character.
Lee Correy AKA G. Harry Stine’s 1981Space Doctor is a speculative look at early orbital medical services, presented in a way that suggested what the space workers really need is OSHA intervention.
I was going to list that one. I have a paperback of it floating around somewhere. Also, the OSHA intervention is of course a significant plot point in the book!
F. Paul Wilson has decided to revisit that first book of his, a reboot that takes place on Earth, now. The sequel to “Double Threat”, “Double Dose” is just out (but not at my library).
Alan Nourse’s Star Surgeon is an early contribution to this subgenre. A bit difficult to understand why no techologically-advanced species in known space had a clue about medicine, bar humanity, but if you overlook that, it’s not a bad read.
I have the old Scholastic paperback edition of that! Ah, Scholastic books, next to my dad my biggest source of SF when I was a schoolgirl.
The Scholastic book sales were a highlight of grade school (once I moved a school big enough to have them).
This was more than a bit like the ” planet of hats” trope. Or, perhaps, some form of generalized racial determinism.
_Suelen_, the fifth book in Rachel Neumaier’s _Tuyo_ trilogy, is about being a magical healer with patients stranded in a magic-abhorring community. It really needs to be read in its place in the sequence, but it’s a very good swords-and-sorcery and honor and lower-tech series.
How about S. L. Viehl’s Stardoc series? https://www.amazon.com/Stardoc-10-book-series/dp/B08RD63WZY.
I know I read the first one, I think I read the second one, I know I gave up because it was being too grimdark for me.
Oh you only read the first two happy books then! It gets much *much* darker. (But does resolve into something not dark in the end.)
Chalice by Robin McKinley!
While Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric is not technically a physician, he does a fair amount of medical work in the course of the series so far.
He doesn’t start as a healer, but there is a period when he’s working a physician.
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He’s not psychologically suited to it, as he burns himself out trying to heal everyone. So in most of the books he’s acting as a troubleshooter, the answer to people’s prayers to his God, the Bastard. But in a couple of the books, such as the Physicians of Vilnoc, he’s using his training to be a doctor.
Those books serve as very strong evidence that not being a doctor is his calling. Do something, *anything* else. It took him something like three years to, uh, “give up” the first time: on the basis of _The Physicians of Vilnoc_ I’m surprised it took him more than a week or two to burn out. (But perhaps it was a bit less intense the first time round.)
It was considered a juvenile, but the Alan Nourse “Star Surgeon” fired my imagination as an early teen. It tacked xenophobia, enemies becoming friends, and over dependence on minor advantages.
There’s Bladerunner the book by Alan Nourse as well, with the blackmarket appendectomies, and no replicants in sight.
And a screen play by William S Burroughs.
“Briar’s Book”, book 4 of Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic series, is about our mage heroes fighting an epidemic. Nice job of transplanting the scientific method into a medieval fantasy setting.
Ole Doc Methuselah by L Ron Hubbard and Prostho Plus by Piers Anthony (if you include dentists)
Sharon Webb wrote a series of shorts about nurse Terra Tarkington that were collected as The Adventures of Terra Tarkington. I always thought the stories owed a lot to the Sector General stories, though they tended to be more humorous in natures (like so many that ran in Asimov’s during the George Scithers era).
Machine: A White Space Novel, the 2nd book in Elisabeth’s Bear’s White Space series, is fabulous.
The Sector General series is the gold standard for this genre. I thought about trying to put House into that setting for fanfic, then realised that Conway is often very similar in his approach so it seemed a little unnecessary.
One of the things Star Trek got wrong was that medicine was more or less magic a lot of the time – McCoy would name some weird drug or something, or spout a little technobabble, and a few hours later the patient would be cured, unless they needed to kill off a redshirt or two to establish that there was a real problem. Babylon 5 was much better in that respect, people took realistic amounts of time to recover and there would sometimes be unexpected problems caused by alien psychology e.g. the kid whose parents thought he would lose his soul if he underwent a particular operation, with some evidence at the end that they weren’t necessarily wrong.
Babylon 5 shared with Sector General the areas of the space station for people with different life support needs, which Sector General staff are always taking short-cuts through so that the reader can see lots of different alien patients.
Regards a Sector General TV SHow/Movie: I was talking to James White at a convention and he said that he had trouble getting published but the media rights for Sector General kept changing hands and brought in a steady income for him.
SO its likely they are with someone , its just not happening, as much as we would wish it to
I think James White wrote in “Star Healer” that quite early in Sector General’s publication history, he was told that his running a space doctor story series had put off Harry Harrison from doing that. Hmm.
Leeta from Elfquest
Leeta! A gifted healer who has to face the ethical and moral consequences of her decisions. And her counterpart Winnowill, whose powers are much greater partly because she has no qualms whatsoever.
See also Elizabeth Moon’s short story “ABC’s in Zero-G” (1986), about paramedics on a space station serving an asteroid mining enterprise, who need to develop new techniques for dealing with injuries in that environment. Originally published in Analog, it’s a classic “problem-solving” story, made vivid by the fact that Moon was an EMT.
I was trying to do ‘Five Books by Authors Who Are Also Physicians,’ but only came up with F. Paul Wilson and Alan Nourse.
As I recall, Wilson and Nourse were the pair Analog got to write a paired article on Medicade. Wilson’s was “And Now, From the People Who Brought You Vietnam and Watergate . . . ” and was against. Nourse’s was “When Somebody Hands You a Lemon . . . ” and was … for is overstating it. Convinced it was not going to vanish.
Michael Crichton was also a doctor.
There’s Prostho Plus by Piers Anthony, about a dentist, which has the advantage of being a standalone, sparing the reader the common Anthony decision of when to give up on a deteriorating series. As far as I remember there are no underage girls involved, but it is many years since I read it.
I haven’t read Sector General, but there WAS a hospital in space TV show: Mercy Point.
For another suggestion, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s House of Open Wounds is about a field hospital…?
I recommend S.E. Sasaki’s Grace Lord series, starting with Welcome to the Madhouse. Grace Lord – military surgeon – begins her assignment aboard a hospital space station and is attacked by a gorilla soldier in a space suit. And it gets weirder from there. And funny, too.
That honestly reminds me of The Adventures of Dr McNinja, which, uh, well, a taste of the reamplifying weirdness of this webcomic is that our titular doctor’s assistant is a gorilla (not a talking gorilla, just a gorilla, but clearly as intelligent as anyone else in the setting), yet this goes totally unremarked on for *years* until a chapter pops up with the title ‘Why A Gorilla?”. Why indeed…
(I consider Dr McNinja to be clearly SF, of a particular hallucinatory sort. He spends much more time engulfed in weirdness than actually doing anything medical though, mostly because he specialises in such bizarre diseases that he gets hardly any patients. How many people do *you* know who are at risk of turning into Paul Bunyan? How does this disease even survive? Any cases would make the national news, so there must be hardly any…)
Sarah J. Maas’ Throne of Glass (YA) series has healers. I think the book Empire of Storms delves deep into the healers’ school and how how the magic works. It also explains why magic users and healers were hunted and killed on the continent where most of the story takes place and those who could fled to the southern continent. I just finished the series.
Story : Jungle Doctor (1955), by Robert Young
psi-therapist Sarith has mistakenly teleported not to Chalce, but to some mysterious other planet currently experiencing a snowstorm. (…) Inspired by a book she reads about Albert Schweitzer (and the fact that her transporter belt is rapidly running out of juice), she decides to stay on this primitive planet helping to psychically heal Earthlings.
Nick O’Donohoe’s Crossroads books, about vet students who are given access to an interdimensional nexus where they have to treat… entities.
The California Coven Project by Bob Stickgold (1981). In the dystopian 1990s, a group of midwives create a rather … unusual cancer cure.
A recent audio drama called EOS-10 follows the space-station-hospital format. I started listening to it for the MEDSF vibes and stayed for the characters and comedy.
Urban fantasy has Extreme Medical Services by Jamie Davis. Really fun look at being a medic for the paranormal residents of a big city.
Jody Lyn Nye also wrote Taylor’s Ark and Medicine Show about an itinerant space doc.
(love love love Sector Genera and I second the Star doc series by S.L. Viehl.)
Oh, urban fantasy. I haven’t seen mention of the Dr. Greta Helsing series by Vivian Shaw, beginning with Strange Practice. She treats a variety of supernatural and undead characters. I tend to avoid books that have vampires as characters but these worked great for me. (Also, hi, other otter)
It’s a thread through intertwined space opera series and you can’t really separate it out (other than the Dreamhealer books) but there’s quite a bit of medicine in MCA Hogarth’s Peltedverse books. In the Dreamhealer series starting with Mindtouch, Jahir and Vasiht’h are students of different species who meet in a xenopsychology program, and their training includes internships at hospitals. The series beginning with Earthrise introduces Hirianthial, an Eldritch who has left his isolated planet and trained as a doctor. In later books in the series, Hirianthial and Jahir are establishing a hospital on the Eldritch homeworld.
Yes, this series is excellent! There are 5 books in the “duology” and all delightful. It intersects with several other series in the same universe in somewhat confusing ways (including the same characters who go on to establish a modern medical practice on a dying feudal world)–check out the peltedverse wiki if you want to continue the adventures. I read and fell in love with Dreamhealers first, though.
Comments on two novels already mentioned.
1) Dreamsnake – First, (spoiler alert) the entire story hinges on the protagonist finally figuring out that dream snakes have three sexes. Anything that basic to their biology would necessarily be found in lots of other species on that world and should not have been such a big secret. Second, three sexes is not evolutionarily stable and will reduce to just two sexes. I used to use this example in my advanced evolution course.
(To echo a sentiment expressed in another article concerning archeology, SF authors rarely get evolution right.)
2) Star Surgeon – Sentient viruses. Ain’t gonna happen!
The “snakes” were alien animals and the people who imported them to Earth were not the sort of suppliers who provide customers with users manuals.
I vaguely recall reading a book about 60 years ago about a plague that struck one of the Jovian moons and introduced the ,then, novel concept of vaccination. I think it might have been by Lester Del Rey. Anybody have a clue what it might have been?
That’s Outpost on Jupiter_.
Re Claudia J Edwards, I believe the reason why there wasn’t more was that she died. There’s very little info though, it’s suggested she died in 2010 (there’s an obit for a Claudia J Edwards but it doesn’t mention that she was an author, so it may not be the same person).
‘Leech’ by Hiron Ennes? Surprised nobody has flagged this one yet. For those who have yet to read it, the lead character is a very special doctor in a grotesque fantasy/steampunk setting. Wonderful wee novel full of imagination.
Prostho Plus by Piers Anthony. About the only sci fi novel I’m aware of featuring a dentist doing dentistry as the protagonist.
Possible the inspiration for the segment in the TV Series Round the Bend of clay-animated B-movie parody serials featuring the protagonist Roger Prentice, apprentice space dentist….
Once I discovered it I basically inhaled all of James White’s hospital books – still own them some 50 years later! Now I look forward to seeking out a few of the others on this list!
Roger Zelazny’s To Die in Italbar: the dark side of being a healer.
It’s arguable that Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series is about healing, mindhealing, magical healing, the healing of a world after the mage wars.