I was watching the original series recently and I noticed Bones mentioned that his knowledge of Alien (non Human) anatoimy and physiology was rudimentary at best, when Sarek had a heart attack he struggled to help him (saying in essence he wished he knew what the stats meant).
By the TNG era and beyond, they knew a lot more; Crusher, Bashir and even the Doctor had no problem in treating non human patients.
So the question arises, did StarFleet become less Xenophobic, or was it just McCoy.
It may be just McCoy. In some of the early novelizations (James Blish and Joe Haldeman, I believe) it’s mentioned that McCoy joined Star Fleet in the midst/immediate aftermath of a messy divorce. This is also mentioned in the new movie so I’m willing to accept it as true.
It’s presented as an impulse decision of his as a means of getting a new start. So it’s possible he signed up and Star Fleet said ‘Well, holy crap, not a lot of fully accredited MDs signing up for deep space missions, let’s assign him a ship!’ and off he went. But prior to that he was a doctor with an exclusively human patient-set. Suddenly he’s out there playing catch up ball on all the other species he needs to treat. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t learn…just that he’s starting from further back than someone who went to school with the idea of studying non-human medicine.
If you have a heart attack or an asthama situation and there is a dentist nearby he can help stabilise you until you see a proper doctor for the issue; he will have at least a passing idea of what to do. On the other hand, McCoy in living in a Federation where there are many species should have at least had the basic idea of what to do and did not.
Except IIRC McCoy’s medical speciality was xenophysiology. I think that Bones’ personality involved a bit of self-depreciation so his claims to not know his profession is a bit much. With Vulcans, could it be their secrecy? It seems that they were not too forward about offering up important facts about themselves like that they have a third eyelid.
IIRC, McCoy was an expert on space psychology; Doctor M’Benga was the Enterprise’s go-to human for Vulcan medicine.
It is also stated many times that many many different species live on earth during and fate McCoys era, it’s theFederation Capital after all.So it’s not like McCoy is from some backwater,
Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a doctor!
Why in space did they need a doctor anyway? Machines did all the diagnosis and treatment. I think the whole medical facility on the Enterprise was really a santized TV version of the ship’s brothel.
In the sixth movie, his lack of knowledge of alien medicine comes back to bite him again, but this time Klingon, not Vulcan. Though that’s perhaps more excusable, since there would be very few Klingons living in Federation space at the time.
Well, maybe between the time of TOS and TNG humans managed to garner a lot more info on xenophysiology.
Spock is the only Vulcan in starfleet, and is half human, so a starfleet doctor doesn’t really need to know Vulcan medicine unless he happens to be unlucky enough to be on the one ship with Spock.
I have a vague sense the Federation in the original series was a lot more human centric then it became in later Trek iterations. I can’t recall the Enterprise having any non-human crew except for Spock (who is half-human). Or any non-human residents of the various Federation outposts the Enterprise stops at. And Sarek is ambassador to the Federation, suggesting that as originally conceived even the Vulcans weren’t members. Granted I haven’t watched the series in a few decades, so maybe I’m just forgetting something.
When the movies came out, they had a bigger make-up budget, and the Federation was more explicitly a federation of multiple non-human worlds. But I don’t think they ever really said that most of the federation worlds in TOS were inhabited by aliens.
“Listen to yourselves. Inalienable Human rights… Starfleet is a Homo sapiens only club!”
or the essence there of… may have said Federation instead of Starfleet…
Well, there was a all-Vulcan ship that was wiped out by the giant one-cell creature (“shut up Spock, we’re rescuing you” “Why thank you, Captain McCoy”).
But let’s remember a lot of TOS was written for humour. You had a form of humour with some Southern USA person continually bad mouthing his own abilities but were actually quite smart. Like several years later Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina would continually say during the Watergate hearings that he was “just an old country lawyer”. Right sure,Harvard Law School in 1922 was just filled with country bumpkins. I doubt very much if there was some overriding concern to present a fully formed picture of the 23rd century. Just a bunch of writers, producers, actors and crews trying to make a 60 minute show every week to make a living. I don’t mean to come off rude but I think too many people simply forget these guys are just trying to make a living. Like Groucho Marx said on college tours in the early 1970s when students would ask “how did you arrive at the theme of Duck soup that the masses are fodder to be manipulated by the elites?”. “We were sitting around one day trying to think of our next picture and one of us said-let’s make a war movie. Groucho willmake a great head of state because he talks so fast and Harpo will look funny as a general. You don’t like my answer? Well, I think when Melville wrote Moby Dick,he was just trying to write a sea story. It was the critics who thought he was being symbolic”.
By any objective measure the crew of the Enterprise does not appear to be spectacularly competent and frequently gets into difficulties because of exceedingly poor judgment. The ship itself seems largely capable of autonomic operation. Has it occurred to anyone that Starfleet, far from being the premier organization for exploration and scientific research, may actually be the dumping ground for half-wits and slackers who are otherwise just in the way of real progress? A way, perhaps, of getting rid of the useless third of their population.
You’re going/where no man/has gone before
Don’t ask us/where that is/we have no idea.
You’re going/on this great mission/because
you’re healthy/and strong/and make a lot of fuss.
Especially around us./We like you better/when you’re far away.
Stranger
Not necessarily. Member nations have ambassadors to the UN. It’s not really clear whether the Federation is a nation in its own right, or more like a UN-style treaty organization.
Until they tried replacing the crew with the ultimate computer, and we all know how THAT turned out!
He was the Vulcan Ambassador to Earth, not the Federation. Vulcan’s always been a member of the Federation, and in the same episode he was introduced in, you had the Tellarites and Andorians, two more obviously alien species who were also member species.
You’ve got to realize that Star Trek exists in an alternate time line where computers did not getting exponentially better, or suffered a huge setback*. The computers on the Enterprise were not that much better than what they were in the 1960s. Sure, the input method had improved, and there was improvement in raw calculation speed, but nothing compared to modern computers. They may be better than modern ones in a few ways, but not in most of them.
It’s not until Star Trek: The Next Generation that computers started beating out modern 21st century computers, and, even then, there are ways in which they are still inferior, such as how PADDs work.
There was even an episode of Star Trek: Voyager that explained the technological boom as being caused by an alternate timeline where 29th century technology was stolen and reverse engineered in the past, causing a tech boom in the 1990s. Due to the way time travel works in Star Trek, that means that, up until that episde, technology in the 1990s wasn’t that advanced.
And while Star Trek: Enterprise has better computers, it is itself a revised history due to time travel, as is the 2009 movie.
*I’ve always wondered if something like the new Battlestar Galactica’s background happened, reverting us back to a less computerized world.
not a bricklayer.