The novel “Hospital Station” by James White was published for the first time in 1962. It’s a fix-up of five short stories published in the previous years. It’s the first book in the Sector General series.
When two workers are killed in a work accident during the construction of a section of the Hospital Station, O’Mara is suspected of negligence. An investigation must shed light on the events and in the meantime, the man is assigned the task of looking after the victims’ very young child.
For O’Mara, babysitting is a complex task because he knows nothing about what a child who belongs to that alien species needs. This is another problem considering that he will only be acquitted thanks to the testimony of another worker with whom he has a far-less-than-friendly relationship.
James White wanted to be a doctor but his family didn’t have the money to allow him to study. Throughout his life, he did various jobs and as a writer, he at least managed to have something to do with medicine, even if he didn’t do that directly. He was successful to the point that he’s credited with creating a subgenre that consists of a science fiction version of the medical drama genre with patients who are not human.
“Hospital Station” collects the first stories of the Sector General series, which introduce the setting of the colossal space station built in deep space to serve as a hospital for any sentient species. In a genre that tends to have humanoid aliens, James White started writing stories in which doctors had to treat patients with the most diverse physical characteristics. This also means that each species has a different physiology and has evolved in an environment with a certain gravity and a certain atmosphere. For this reason, the hospital station is equipped to reproduce these environments.
The first story gives an early idea of the difficulties that can exist in an environment where many different species work together and even babysitting a child of another species can be very problematic. O’Mara, the protagonist of this story, also appears in the following ones, where the medical cases are dealt with by another protagonist, Dr. Conway.
Doctors literally download into their brains the information needed to treat patients of a certain species. This can also have a certain influence on the doctor’s mind and adds complications to their activity. The stories are built like the cases in a normal medical drama but treating alien patients can be really difficult even with all the information on their characteristics.
The setting of the General Sector series is explicitly pacifist, based on the ability of sentient beings to go beyond any form of xenophobia to work together. The conflicts can concern specific people, a term that is meant in a very broad sense, and also on the best way to treat a patient. Sometimes, it’s a way to increase the tension in a case where it’s difficult to diagnose the problem of a patient who, for some reason, can’t communicate.
It’s clearly noticeable that “Hospital Station” is formed by the union of various stories since there are independent episodes although you can notice a certain progress in the careers of some important characters. Above all, the different episodes show James White’s imagination in inventing medical cases in which the science fiction element is developed very deeply. This is what determined the success of the Sector General series making it a classic and is the reason why I recommend reading it decades later. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
