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"[Science fiction is] nightmares and visions, always outlined by the barely possible."
- Gregory Benford
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| Robot-Surgeon | ||
| A perfect robot for perfected human beings. |
In the story, Rex starts out as a doctor for other robots, but eventually learns what he needs to know about human beings.
| IT WAS a thing of glistening levers and bell cranks, of flexible shafting, cams, and delicate mechanical fingers, of vacuum tubes and photo-electric cells, of relays that clicked in ordered sequence when called upon to perform their myriad functions, of pumps, tanks, condensers, reactances, microphones, and loud-speakers. A robot, created by the master scientists of the twenty-third century.
 (Rex the Robot-Surgeon) The robot-surgeon, it was sometimes called. And indeed the term was most appropriate, for this robot was chief of the mechanicals ; its control tubes and relays provided the ability not only to diagnose swiftly and unerringly the slightest electrical or mechanical faults of the lesser robots but to supervise their correction... Rex peered into a white-walled room where human surgeons operated on human patients. He observed that their procedure was much the same as his own ; that they dissected the body or head or other portions of human anatomy and made repairs in similar manner to that which he used on his own robot patients. Forthwith, he began, in the library, an intensive study of the human brain and anatomy. |
| Technovelgy from Rex,
by Harl Vincent. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1934 Additional resources -
|
Compare to automaton steam surgeon from The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1828) by Jane Webb Loudon.
For automated medicine, compare to the emergency treatment tank from Agent of Vega (1949) by James Schmitz, the shipboard medical treatment from Contagion (1950) by Katherine MacLean, the
Gobathian from Time is the Simplest Thing (1961) by Clifford Simak, the surgical homeostatic unit from Now Wait For Last Year (1966) by Philip K. Dick, the diagnostat from The Man in the Maze (1969) by Robert Silverberg, electronic body analyzer from The Andromeda Strain (1969) by Michael Crichton, the crechepod from The Godmakers (1972) by Frank Herbert and the autosurgeon from Altered Carbon (2003) by Richard Morgan.
See also the phymech robot doctor from Wanted in Surgery (1957) by Harlan Ellison.
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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
