Both Bones and Scotty just lied about their abilities so that they would look better when they pulled off the “impossible”. They were very competent but didn’t set expectations too high.
And the kid is named McCoy.
No one’s mentioned that the 75-year earlier NX-01 Enterprise’s doctor was a freaking alien himself!
Whenever answering these questions you have to balance the nerd - ST as real with the realistic - ST as TV show reasons. By and far the reason Deforest Kelly played the character like that was because it fit the dramatical needs of the TV series. ST:TOS is often (accurately) described as being a three-way love/hate triangle between Kirk, Spock & McCoy. Their character’s dynamics had to play off of each other: Spock was the brain, McCoy the heart, and Kirk was the cock, sorry, Kirk was the arbiter of which got used when.
Consequently McCoy, along with being a more than adapt physician, was a very emotional, old school, and decidedly human being. He certainly wasn’t prejudiced, just the opposite, but it made sense that he not be real ‘worldly’, new-age kind of doctor that was an expert in too much alien anatomy.
Plus, if you think of the NCC-1701 like an aircraft carrier Bones would have spent 99.99% of his time treating the 400+ humans on board rather than too many aliens. With that in mind it kind of made sense to have Phlox from ST:ENT be more flexible both because the NX-01’s crew was much smaller and because so much less of the galaxy had been explored at their time.
Interesting that the Drs of the Star Trek series were always very likable characters: McCoy, Crusher, Phlox, Voyager’s holographic ‘The Doctor’. Except for Bashir, he was kind of an immature jerk. And Dr. Pulaski, what a miserable c*nt!
Don’t forget Dr Boyce (John Hoyt) from “The Cage” pilot who carried around a portable martini kit because a man will sometimes tell his bartender things he won’t tell his doctor. He was also smart enough to warn at a briefing about the Talosians’s power of deceptions. OTOH Dr Piper (Paul Fix) in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” didn’t get to show much warmth.
Would it actually make more sense to keep ship crews segregated?
Each member species is going to prefer an enviornment slightly different than others in terms of gravity, temperature, and atmospheric mix.
McCoy gets assigned to ships that are 99.9% Human. M’Benga gets assigned because Spock is there (and is the son of an important Vulcan).
I don’t buy that it was just good-natured self-deprecation. In Star Trek VI, his lack of familiarity with Klingon physiology ends up almost thrusting the Federation and the Empire into full-on war, and at trial with his and Kirk’s lives at stake, he still admits (with considerable frustration) that his knowledge of Klingons is inadequate, and that he probably couldn’t have saved the ambassador.
I kind of think of it as an EU sort of thing - like what the EU’s fans would like it to be in twenty years or so, so. There’s a common currency, civil service, foreign service and military, and a fairly strong common foreign policy and defense policy. However, national sovereignty remains with the member worlds, who still can choose to maintain their own militaries and conduct their own foreign affairs outside the Federation framework. (Recall Spock’s efforts in TNG to advance the cause of Vulcan/Romulus reunification.)
And in Amok Time T’Pau is described as the only person to turn down a seat on the Federation High Council (or something like that.) She also has enough clout to get Kirk off after he disobeys an order.
Vulcans however are still considered odd in TOS time. Commodore Decker seems unaware ahead of time that Vulcan don’t bluff, which would be odd if he went to the Academy with them. You never get from TOS that first contact was made with Vulcan, and that they came to earth before we went there.
Sadly, it is almost as if the writers never watched other episodes/movies. there were so many contradictions, drove me crazy. I know a lot of fans love endless wanking about how this and that fit together but, c’mon, enough!
By VOY and ENT, the franchise was huge. But, even with the size, fans could keep up with things. Why couldn’t the creators? The TOS issues I can let slide. Things were different then, no one knew what was to come in later years.
Telephone sanitizers?
Back to the OP for a minute. You’ll recall that in *The Trouble With Tribbles *McCoy was able to simply wave his medical scanner over Arne Darvin and deduce from the readings that Darvin was a Klingon.
So, while McCoy shuddered at the thought of actually performing open heart surgery on a Vulcan for the first time, he probably had about all the training Starfleet offered.
On a side note; is T’Pau supposed to be related to Spock somehow? Somehow I got the impression that she was supposed to be his (great-)aunt. Spock’s family is supposed to be one of Vulcan’s leading families (isn’t Spock the great-grandson of the Vulcan who made first contact with Zephram Cochrane?).
That’s the same sloppy-writing behind concepts like Vulcans don’t lie. Of course they bluff and lie, but you don’t tell the round-ears you bluff and lie, especially when you’re trying to bluff and lie to them.
It could be that most of the time it was good-natured self-deprecation, but in Star Trek VI he really didn’t know what he was doing with Chancellor Gorkon. Treating Vulcans, Andorians, or Tellarites (and Humans, of course) is one thing–they’re Federation members, and presumably any Federation doctor who doesn’t have direct experience could at least look them up in the standard databases. Klingons, at the time of ST:VI, were still The Enemy. A Federation doctor might genuinely lack vital information about them. (Perhaps Romulans might be easier to deal with, even when Federation-Romulan relations were in one of their deep freeze phases, since Romulan anatomy and physiology are fairly close to Vulcan.)
Klingons had, as of STVI, still only been recovered from the failed Augment virus for a couple decades, so what medical information the Feds had on them may well have been out of date, and only updated to record unaugmented Klingon physiology after that incident.
Vulcans lie, but I’m not sure about bluffing. In The Corbomite Maneuver, after Kirk bluffs, Spock says poker is interesting and Scotty and McCoy cheerfully offer to teach him how to play. However I don’t know how anyone even partially observant could go through college without seeing someone play poker.
I’d be very much surprised if there were anyone in these sorts of conversations who was unaware of this. The point of the game is to treat these shows like they were created with a coherent internal logic and history, and then trying to explain the apparent lapses and contradictions. Pointing out that it’s just a TV show, and that the writers didn’t care about stuff like that, is not only redundant, but kind of a spoilsport.
[hijack]We know from Melville’s own letters and diaries that his symbolism was entirely intentional. After finding some moderate success as, essentially, an author of travelogues. Later in life, he befriended Nathanial Hawthorne, who introduced him to literary ideas and themes he hadn’t encountered before (in particular, a deeper critical understanding of William Shakespeare) that he consciously attempted to include in Moby Dick.[/hijack]
So figure Spock was bluffing and the problem disappears.
It’s sort of like the scene in in Babylon 5 when Londo is teaching Lennier to play poker. He looks at his hand, comments “Interesting; the odds of this hand are only 1 in 2.6 million”, and everyone else folds. Londo berates him for giving away his hand like that, saying that he could have won much more… But it’s never actually revealed to have been a winning hand. Lennier told the truth: The odds of the hand he was holding most assuredly were 1 in 2.6 million. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t bluffing.
I don’t think anything about the Vulcans making first contact with Earth before we had ventured out into the galaxy contradicts anything from the original 60s show. The series was smart enough to never go into too many details about its alt history timeline. Actually its not just being smart, its that it wanted to be an accessible, adult drama just as much (more really) as a nerdy, teen scifi series. Famous Roddenberry description - “wagon-train to the stars…”