Abstract
The preceding chapters provide a broad overview of how science fiction can include medical care and concepts. Medicine’s contributions to the genre may involve depicting the ministrations of human (or otherwise) practitioners of the healing arts, a cornucopia of methods to threaten or inflict physical and psychological harm on characters, and using futuristic technologies to heal, rejuvenate, or even remake the human body. This final chapter will summarize and expand on key ideas presented previously as well as introduce several new ones.
The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
Sir William Osler
Science and Immortality (1904)
The best of all physicians
Is apple-pie and cheese!
Eugene Field
“Apple-Pie and Cheese” (1889)
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Notes
- 1.
However, while it might have been at home in a 1930s pulp magazine with a title such as Spicy Science Stories, for a variety of reasons I do not encourage anyone to use this particular sentence or anything similar in a modern, serious SF work.
- 2.
I hasten to add that this particular dialogue never has nor ever will appear in any of my own science fiction stories…although I have been guilty of occasionally using a similar style for purposes of parody and satire.
- 3.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March 2002.
- 4.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2010.
- 5.
We are still waiting, however, for some of its other predictions to come true, such as floating cities and weather control stations.
- 6.
There are also a variety of theoretical “many-worlds” interpretations involving quantum mechanics in which every possible alternative event/future does indeed become “real.” However, until that idea is confirmed (assuming it can be, even if true), from a practical standpoint I will refer here to the sole future that we humans collectively seem to experience.
- 7.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January/February 2013.
- 8.
Personal communication.
- 9.
This work was originally published as a short story in 1958, expanded into a novel first published in 1966, and was the basis for the 1968 movie Charly.
- 10.
See my article “Bad Medicine: When Medical Research Goes Wrong” ( Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2010) for more about this.
- 11.
This scenario was depicted in The Twilight Zone episode “The Gift” (1962).
- 12.
As illustrated by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1866), it is also prudent for the physician him- or herself to not become the first human test subject for evaluating a new medication.
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Stratmann, H. (2016). Summing Up: Using Medicine in Science Fiction. In: Using Medicine in Science Fiction. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16015-3_15
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