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"We follow the scientists around and look over their shoulders. They're watching their feet: provable mistakes are bad for them. We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes."
- Larry Niven
 |
| 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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