Not only is McCoy tech-averse, his latent racism would come to light in any futuristic psych-evaluations.
And while Phlox’s approach is interesting, I’d think that everyone needs to be on the same page as far as medicine goes.
Starfleet Medical: “We got your patient, but we’re having trouble stabilizing his vital signs”
Phlox: “Did you inject another generation of Denebian Slime Maggots”?
Starfleet Medical: “I…what?”
Well, McCoy is a country doctor. I’m not sure how he got to be on ANY starship, let alone the Federations flag ship.
I don’t see Phlox as a luddite. He just practices established medicine from his home planet. I don’t think Phlox would have a problem using transporters for example. Well maybe not the ones on the Enterprise, but I think he’d be okay with one from a Vulcan ship.
You might as well ask how people like Reg Barclay get onto a ship at all without an escort and a written pledge that he won’t touch anything.
Was McCoy actually depicted as a Luddite in the Original Series? I remember the complaints about the transporter from the movies and his cameo in the Next Generation pilot, but my (admittedly hazy) memory of him in TOS was that he used plenty of cutting edge medical tech. And to the extent he used low-tech solutions, such as troweling on silicon paste to treat the Horta, that’s because a low-tech solution was what was available and it worked.
‘Luddite’ is a strong word, but i mean surely by futuristic standards.
He just seems generally skeptical of high-tech solutions, and rightly so on many occasion. He keeps an old-style respirator in sick-bay. Says things like, “I can do that with a course of exercise and vitamins!”…bemoans ‘fancy ideas’ like M5 (I think)…immediatly sees the downside of the Genesis Project and launches into a typical McCoy Rant.
I’m more wondering how an openly rascist person like McCoy got past Starfleet training. His attacks on Spock are painful to watch these days. Listen McCoy, just because you come from Georgia doesn’t mean you have to act like an antebellum plantation owner.
I figure it was the 2260s rise of social conservativism that got him his posting. “We don’t want none of their kind in our earth-only club.” Look at Starfleet in those days - crew cut, god-fearing “hardhat” officers. They all affected this “spartan” mindset. No art on the walls. Minimalism. Hardship as a virtue. By ST:TMP a social revolution had occurred not unlike the 1970s. Checkov was an early adopter, with that hair.
Now Reg - well, if he can get past Starfleet selection, what exactly do they have against Wes? Probably he’s too smart.
Anyone with an imagination can see that!
My take is, that’s exactly what Starfleet wanted. David was right - the scientists were actually pawns of the military.
And as a weapon, well… drop a Genesis device inside a Borg cube and problem solved. Not only do you get rid of them you can make a new planet. Who cares if it is unstable.
Enterprise (the series) laid the groundwork for that kind of conservatism and xenophobia, but because the good guys have to win…showed them ‘fixing’ it.
The original Enterprise wasn’t the flagship though, it was just another constitution class starship. Also, with only minimal help from a super-tech teaching device, McCoy can re-implant a brain, so he’s probably highly skilled.
McCoy is generally seen as giving a side eye to whatever is pitched as the latest This Is THE Wonder Tech Solution To Our Problems (M5, Genesis). He obviously embraces high technology that allows the best medical results (e.g. pills to regrow kidneys). And he probably has yet to be convinced, philosophically, that the transporter does not just vaporize the original you and make a copy every single time, but he’ll use it if he has to. He reserves the right to grumble out loud.
As to the speciesist schtick, part of the point would be that in the TOS universe we are technologically advanced, but no, we have not yet individually become “perfected humans” by a long shot, nor have we purged our negative traits or deep-suppressed them like Vulcans did with emotions. Of course the real answer is “because this was written in 1966 and he’s a stand-in for people and ideas that were around in 1966”. (Meanwhile the franchise has sort of attempted some bothsidesism by establishing that the Vulcans themselves can be quite the bigoted pricks.)
In Abrams’ reboot version we see a Starfleet where Kirk and McCoy seem to join because they have nowhere else to go. That casts the organization as one that says, can you be trained and do your job? That’s all we care about. So there’s another component. (And what tells us the trends of the 2010s will be the trends forever, anyway?)
In the Next-Generation case with Barclay, well… in a world where you ostensibly can just go and seek whatever is your self-realization at little or no risk or expense, it may be that for the less-than-glamorous specialites and career tracks they still have to take whoever shows up.
I think it’s a two-fold answer.
First, discrimination was tolerated more in that era (in universe) than later. There was an entire episode concerning a female officer, Dr. Janice Lester, who wanted to be a captain but didn’t get the position because she was female. (The episode is called Turnabout Intruder.) The Federation underwent a significant change in a generation (or was it a hundred years) before the Next Generation. It still hasn’t completely gone away. Worf has made a sexist comment or two, and he’s a heroic character.
Second, Trek was written in an era where that kind of talk was “tolerated”. I remember visibly how that kind of talk was not tolerated in 2007, when Don Imus made a racist remark that was recorded. Imus was an older white male with a lot of wealth, and tried to brush it off, but he still got fired. I’m pretty sure if he made that remark in 1970 he would have gotten, at most, a slap on the wrist. (Of course, Donald Trump revived openly saying racist things and getting away with it.) Trek itself is in an odd position; the original series tolerated more sexism than is tolerated today, and prequel series such as Enterprise and Star Trek: Discovery are less sexist than the original series as they were written in the 21st century.
In the Enterprise Era, humans are a bunch of backwoods yokels doing donuts in the more civilized parts of the galaxy. Phlox is a competent doctor from an already warp capable species. If anything, he’s slumming it.
I don’t disagree. But let’s be honest. The “decontamination” chamber was just an excuse to get T’pol and Yoshi half naked. And the rubbing of ointment on each other was a bit over the top.
A BIT?
That was so over the top, it sailed right over the top and achieved escape velocity.
Though to be fair, they had hunky guy decontamination as well. #bothsiderism. 
I like to retcon that as being her mental instability made her believe she was passed over for command because she was a woman, but in reality it was because she was bat-shit crazy, and everyone could see it but her. The episode supports this conclusion.
But I think the writers probably intended what she said to be truth.
On the flipside of McCoy being a Luddite, we have his rant in Star Trek IV about late 20th century doctors being butchers, using leeches and medieval torture devices.
He’s clearly uncomfortable with using fancy new technology for the sake of using fancy new technology when proven, lower-tech techniques work perfectly well, and he’s keenly aware of the potential any new technology has for unintended consequences, but I don’t think he’s hostile to new technology, per se. He certainly has no hesitation in using the most advanced technology available to synthesize a cure for the addictive tears of Troyan women, or for any number of other space maladies the crew encounters.
Now, the remarks about “that green ice water you call blood”…
Far from being a “Luddite”, ‘Bones’ appears to be the only one who understands the philosophical and practical implications of a ‘transporter’ that literally disintegrates the entire body, streams it as fundamental particles across hundreds or thousands of kilometers, and somehow reassembles it into something resembling the original form with sufficient fidelity that it is still a living body at the other end. This isn’t just a ‘Ship of Theseus’ type of metaphysical corundum; it is literally murder and replacement. He is quite right to be dubious about this device.
As for the rest of the crew (of TOS, TNG, Voyager, Enterprise, and whatever all the new CBS streaming shows are about), it is quite evident that the various crews are not the best and brightest but rather a collection of malcontents, hyperactives, dim bulbs, anger management cases, and otherwise people that do not fit into the utopos of The United Federation of [Earth and maybe Vulcan] Planets; hence, they have been sent out in a space vessel that is entirely capable of autonomous operation, providing them with a simulacrum of adventure and challenge in order to keep them occupied. The ship’s computer is quite capable of taking their vague requests for ‘analysis’ and processing it into something that seems like a sensible result to resolve their episodic adventures, and nobody every thinks to question why they need to have people crawling around in dangerous, cramped ‘Jeffries tubes’ to perform maintenance instead of using their advanced technology to build robots which can perform all basic maintenance and repair tasks automatically or at most with remote direction.
The technology of Star Trek is obvious bunk, not the least of which are the never-explained ‘shields’ which allow the ship to take direct hits from directed energy and antimatter weapons without any evidence of damage, and if we take the holodecks to be real technology there is little reason to believe that essentially everything they experience is simply the ship’s computer ‘beaming’ the crew into a holodeck and presenting them with fake alien characters that look and talk enough like humans to allow them to be regularly engaged and use up their aggression and energy. Both Dr. Crusher and later her son Wesley were catching onto this, hence Beverly’s sudden disappearance throughout Season 2 (being mind-wiped or replaced by an android) and subsequent stupidity, and Wesley being later whisked away “to the Academy” only to return after a spaceship accident that should have killed him and his own team. (We can be assured that this was a simulation because the same form as his team leader was reused later as the Tom Paris character in Voyager under the correct assumption that no one would recognize him.) Tasha Yar probably also figured this out, hence her untimely removal at the end of Season 1, and as for Lt. Cmdr Data he is almost certainly in on the gag to shepherd the crew on their adventures and facilitate the ship’s computer as its mobile interaction with them.
The only possible exception to this is Deep Space Nine, and this because they need angry warrior types on the edge of space to repulse actual threats like the Dominion (hence why Worf was reassigned there and given a love interest to keep him occupied). By maintaining a diverse crew of malcontents far from ‘Federation Space’, they have a reserve force to fight off potential aggressors while not having to deal with the potential disruption on Idilic Earth. Unfortunately, they neglected to consider the allegory of the Eloi and the Morlocks from The Time Machine and how Benjamin Sisko will ultimately reign over Earth as Supreme Leader once he gets done harnessing the precognitive powers of the wormhole aliens (clearly a reference to Paul Atreides of Dune).
“Did you guys ever watch the show?”
Stranger
They were close friends and ribbed each other. They cared about each other. There was some rivalry, but it was in fun.
I love it. That episode where Beverly is trapped in a bubble universe and says, “If there’s nothing wrong with me, there must be something wrong with the universe”…seems to support your theory.
That’s easy. In TOS at least, they let anyone walk around the ship unescorted and touch stuff, even in areas that you’d think would require security access like the bridge or engineering. No wonder the ship got taken over so often.