Sci-Fi Medics and Doctors

My roundup of red crosses on space hospitals was a lot of fun, but the vein runs deep with medical sci-fi. This time around, I want to get a lot closer up, to focus on the human side of the craft.

And the alien side, and the robot side.

Let's start with a bang: James Warhola's flashy 1983 cover for The Med Series, by Murray Leinster, features a fashionable medic complete with a red cross, a caduceus, red-lined gloves, and even a matching suit for the cute alien baby.

I don't want to rehash the overlapping art from my Space Hospitals post, but this one's too on-theme to pass up: Peter Andrew Jones' 1982 cover to Harry Harrison's Spaceship Medic.

This illustration by the Spanish surrealist Carlos Ochagavia appeared in the famous 1978 art collection Tomorrow and Beyond: Masterpieces of Science Fiction Art.

Gene Szafran's 1972 cover for John Boyd's The Organ Bank Farm really drives home the brain transplant theme by including a second, larger brain behind all the surgeons looking at the first one.

Karel Thole's 1964 cover to Urania #353 illustrates a translation of Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson's The Reefs of Space, in which political prisoners are condemned to become living organ banks.

Paul Bacon’s famous 1977 cover to Robin Cook’s Coma.

Here's Wilson McLean's unpublished poster for the 1970s thriller sci-fi film adaptation of Coma, directed by Michael Crichton.

This one isn't actually science fiction at all: John Berkey depicted an isolation lab in this mid-70s cover art for Modern Medicine Journal.

Here's a Ralph McQuarrie artwork that I believe is for Star Wars, because I'm pretty sure that surgeon and his assistant have the death sentence on 12 systems.

Don Ivan Punchatz's cover to the 1970 short story collection Great Science Fiction About Doctors is a parody of Rembrandt's 1632 painting "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp."

Speaking of sci-fi artists who replace a doctor's patient with a robot, here's a 1929 Norman Rockwell and John Berkey’s cover art to the January 1, 1976 issue of Modern Medicine.

Ed Emshwiller did some of the best 1950s and '60s sci-fi magazine illustrations, and one standout is "Robots Repaired While U Wait," the September 1954 cover to Galaxy Science Fiction. This one occasionally resurfaces as a meme or online article illustration, often without credit to the artist.

Bob Larkin couldn't settle on which medical thriller signifier to use for his 1980 cover to Disposable People, by Marshall Goldberg, M.D. and Kenneth Kay, so he just used them all.

Here's another Don Ivan Punchatz, titled Future of Medicine but not dated.

I could keep going, honestly. The Science Fiction Ruminations blog even has a collection of additional cover artworks that's even more specific: People lying on medical tables while a doctor works on them.

In fact, I even have two more on-the-table illustrations that Ruminations didn't feature, possibly because neither one is a cover. Here's “World of Tomorrow - School, Work and Play,” 1981, by Neil Ardley.

And here's yet another charmingly disturbed Don Ivan Punchatz illustration, done for one of those articles that everyone reads Playboy magazine for.

I'll wrap it up with two more space stations hospitals, both of which I wish I had found in time to include in my original post on the topic.

First up is this beautiful John Harris artwork, a 1987 cover for Sector General by James White, that giant of medical science fiction.

The second is by Vincent Di Fate, the art historian who kindly wrote the foreword for my art collection.

That one's worth including just as a bold example of a unique wheel-shaped station.

However, when I looked it up to find the source, I uncovered an interesting background: The original was done for a 1979 cover to The Menace from Earth, by Robert A. Heinlein, without any red crosses on it!

Di Fate then retouched the same painting when it was used in 1996 for The White Papers, an anthology of novelettes and essays from James White. If you look closely, you can see the original red paint on the sides of the red cross station, covered up with black paint.

Music rec: I'm still on a Sword-and-Sorcery kick. I shared a huge collection of soundtracks a few weeks back, but this one might be even better, since it's a curated selection of tracks.

Next Time: Odds and Ends for July 2025