Star Trek and History (10 page)

In several episodes, McCoy challenges Kirk's decisions about pushing the crew too far, reminding him that they are tired and need rest and that the health and well-being of the
Enterprise
crew are in McCoy's hands as the ship's
only
physician. McCoy's basic diagnostic methods and therapeutic approaches as well as his bedside manner and paternalistic authority are the hallmarks of the old-fashioned good doctor, the general practitioner who effectively treats a wide variety of physical and mental conditions while nurturing his patients within a safe and meaningful relationship.

As the chief medical officer charged with safeguarding the health of the 430 crew members aboard the
Enterprise
, Bones is necessary not only as a general practitioner but also as a specialist trained in biomedical research, surgery, and psychiatry. Like the medical superhero in comic books of old, McCoy is routinely depicted as a renegade scientist who successfully fights disease with creative insight and cutting-edge laboratory skills. In “The Deadly Years,” Bones the free-thinking scientist is faced with a crew on the brink of death due to rapid premature aging; even with the help of Dr. Wallace, a visiting endocrinologist, Bones can't discern whether the cause is “virus, bacteria, or evil spirits.” While Spock determines that the cause is a rare form of radiation, it is ultimately Bones's knowledge of “ancient history from just after the Atomic Age” that provides him with the cure for this strange radiation sickness—adrenaline. Despite the disapprobation of the endocrine specialist who sees adrenaline research as outdated, Bones pushes forward with his hypothesis and saves Kirk, Spock, and Scotty from death.

The almost religious belief in the power of scientific and medical research to solve any problem, even the impossible ones, is a salient feature of the show. In “The Naked Time,” McCoy is once again confronted with a disease of unknown origin, which in this case causes the crew to become intoxicated and therefore nonfunctional. After ordering a biopsy on tissue taken from a deceased crewmember, Bones disappears into the lab; when he reappears, he has not only isolated the strange molecular composition of polywater as the cause of the disease but also developed a serum to counteract its effects.
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In “Operation—Annihilate!” we actually see Bones as both a surgeon and a hands-on biomedical scientist, biopsying Spock and conducting research on a living neural parasite, the very creature that has killed millions and threatens to destroy many more. In “The Tholian Web,” Bones takes on the role of laboratory scientist and is flanked by dripping fluids, chemical bottles, beakers, and flasks as he fights to find a cure for a rare form of space madness resulting from the distortion of brain tissues in the central nervous system.
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After repeated testing, Bones is able to “identify the proper filtering agent” and to find the antidote, a derivative of a Klingon nerve agent called theragen, which is served much like a cocktail to the whole crew. In each of these episodes, it is Bones McCoy, the medical researcher and scientific specialist, who controls biomedical science and proves to be the hero.

As both a country doctor and medical researcher, Bones is aware of the powerful technology at his disposal; advanced testing procedures in the “fourteen science labs” of the
Enterprise
produce miraculous results, as well as instruments such as the tricorder, biobed, hypospray, and painless wound-sealer, make humane medical care possible. Without them, McCoy imagines that medicine would be barbaric, much as it was in the twentieth century, with “all the pain. They used to hand-cut and sew people like garments. Needles and sutures. Oh, the terrible pain!” (
TOS
, “The City on the Edge of Forever”)
15
While Bones benefits from access to “the finest equipment and computers in the galaxy” as well as nearly miraculous medical technology, he realizes that all of these come at a potential cost; for this reason, the good doctor routinely questions the use of cutting-edge technologies, weighing the potential benefits against the dangers to health and humanity. Bones's primary concern, like many members of
Star Trek
's audience in the mid-1960s, was that science and technology might destroy the medical art, dehumanizing it into something completely mechanical. This struggle for the human in an increasingly mechanical and scientific world serves as the crux of several episodes centered on medical ethics, and it lies at the very heart of Bones's and Spock's hate-love relationship.

In a post-Holocaust society,
Star Trek
questioned the morality of humanoid testing and the goals of scientific inquiry.
16
In “Operation—Annihilate!” McCoy is presented with two ethical crises. First, without a cure for the parasites that infest Deneva, Kirk will have to sacrifice one million colonists to protect the billions of beings not yet infected. When Spock supports Kirk's logical but inhuman decision, McCoy retorts, “If killing five people saves ten, it's a bargain. Is that your simple logic, Mister Spock?” Bones's discovery of a cure for the parasites presents him with his second ethical dilemma; without time for additional testing or proper clinical trials, the procedure must be tested on a humanoid subject in conditions similar to that of the Denevans. The infected Spock agrees to undergo the procedure, and he emerges free of the parasite but suffers an unexpected side effect—blindness. Horrified, Bones receives test results from Nurse Chapel that indicate that his rush to treatment was flawed and that Spock's blinding was unnecessary.

In “The Empath,” the Vians construct a menacing laboratory, complete with human-sized test tubes, in which they torture human subjects in order to elicit responses from the empathic healer, Gem. As McCoy lies near death, Gem is faced with the ultimate choice: save herself or sacrifice her life to heal another.
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The goal of the Vians' experiment is to prove that Gem and her people are worthy of being saved from a sun about to nova. Despite the deceptively noble goal of this experiment, we are left to wonder about the ethics of biomedical research that might commit atrocities on the few to save the lives of those deemed worthy to survive.

A recurring theme in the struggle between old-fashioned medicine and biotechnology is that of the body, be it human or alien, as a machine that can be pulled apart and tinkered with. McCoy's distaste for dividing the physical body into microscopic particles is evident in his fraught relationship with the transporter. In
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
(1979), Bones refuses to beam aboard; when Kirk asks where he is, an officer reports, “He insisted we go first, sir. Said something about first seeing how it scrambled our molecules.”

For McCoy, the only thing more frightening than the fragmented machine is the soulless machine, the mechanical man without a mind or free will. In “Spock's Brain,” McCoy is horrified to find Spock “worse than dead,” because his brain his been stolen by creatures known as Eymorg. In the course of retrieving Spock's brain and returning it to his body, both Spock and McCoy must become “mechanical men.” First, Bones and Scotty attach wires and a transmitter to Spock's body, essentially making him a remote-controlled robot. Second, Bones himself must become one with a machine called “the teacher” in order to transplant Spock's brain back into his skull. The dangers of mindless mechanism, of separating the mind from the body, are reinforced in the Eymorg, whose overreliance on “the teacher and the controller” has stultified their mental development over the generations, leaving them helpless.
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In episode after episode, McCoy declares the dangers of splintering mind and soul from flesh and the treatment of the body as some sort of soulless machine.
19

Expressing the concerns of many mid-twentieth-century Americans, Bones questions the dynamic relationship between the traditional practice of medicine, which is focused on caring for the whole person, and biomedical research, which disregards the individual human being in order to examine his or her molecular, chemical, and genetic mechanisms. For Bones, the greatest struggle lies between those who believe that science exists for the benefit of humankind, a powerful tool to improve the quality of human life, and those who believe that humankind serves the master of scientific progress, a higher good that must be perpetuated at all costs. If scientific experimentation, complicated medical devices, and invasive therapies present excessive risk, damage the doctor-patient relationship, or in any way dehumanize the patient, then McCoy rejects them out of hand. Logically, however, he does not reject science and technology completely. Bones needs cold, rational science as part of his medical practice, much as he needs the pointy-eared Spock to provide valuable data and to balance his sometimes excessive human emotionality. He and Spock need each other.

In episodes such as “The Immunity Syndrome,” “The Tholian Web,” and “Spock's Brain,” the solution to preserving life depends not on either Bones or Spock winning an argument, but on both of them working together, often in opposition. Like a heart that requires both diastolic and systolic beats to pump blood, the constant tension and conversation between Spock and Bones keeps a balance between the seemingly monstrous and inhuman power of modern science over the human body, on the one hand, and the kind and compassionate care of the old-fashioned family physician whose concern extends beyond the mechanical body to the heart, mind, and soul of his patients, on the other. Spock might argue that such a heart, fraught with conflict, must beat erratically and therefore inefficiently. McCoy, mint julep in hand, might just smile and reply, “I'm not a magician, Spock, just an old country doctor.” (
TOS
, “The Deadly Years)
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Notes

1.
On Spock's full name, see
TOS
, “This Side of Paradise.”

2.
Bert Hansen, “Medical History for the Masses: How American Comic Books Celebrated Heroes of Medicine in the 1940s,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
78, no. 1 (2004): 150.

3.
Kenneth Ludmerer,
Time to Heal: American Medical Education from the Turn of the Century to the Era of Managed Care
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 147.

4.
Ibid., 149.

5.
Ibid., 180.

6.
For an entertaining treatment of doctors on television, see Joseph Turow,
Playing Doctor: Television, Storytelling, and Medical Power
(Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2010).

7.
Dr. Kildare
, February 21–March 8, 1966.

8.
For the response of practicing physicians in the 1960s to the impossible idealization of their profession on television, see Joseph Turow and Rachel Gans-Boriskin, “From Expert in Action to Existential Angst: A Half Century of Television Doctors,” in
Medicine's Moving Pictures: Medicine, Health, and Bodies in American Film and Television
, eds. Leslie J. Reagan et al. (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007), 270.

9.
“If I seem insensitive to what you're going through, Captain, understand it's the way I am.” Spock to Kirk in
TOS
, “The Enemy Within.”

10.
And later, “Complete empathy. She must be a totally functional empath. Her nervous system actually connected to yours to counteract the worst of your symptoms, and with her strength, she virtually sustained your body's physiological reactions.”

11.
In this he follows the precedent of Dr. Boyce, the ship's physician under Captain Pike aboard the first
Enterprise
, who pulls a martini out of his black bag as a means of treating Pike's stress and fatigue in
TOS
, “The Menagerie.” When Pike accuses him of talking more like a bartender than a physician, Boyce says, “Take your choice. We both get the same two kinds of customers. The living and the dying.”

12.
For McCoy's reprimand of Nurse Chapel, see
TOS
, “Operation—Annihilate!”

13.
Polywater is water that has been transformed into a complex chain of molecules on planet Psi 2000 and behaves much like a virus.

14.
According to McCoy, “The molecular structures of the brain tissues in the central nervous system are distorting” because of the disintegration of space in the region of the USS
Defiant
.

15.
Bones witnesses the barbarity firsthand in
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
(1986), when he has to save Chekov's life in a twentieth-century American hospital while confronting an ancient medical man: “My God, man, drilling holes in his head is not the answer. The artery must be repaired without delay or he will die! So put away your butcher knives and let me save the patient! . . . Chemotherapy, fundoscopic examination, we're dealing with medievalism here!”

16.
The first episode of
Star Trek
was also only six years before the public revelation of the Public Health Service Syphilis Study in 1972; the first letter of complaint regarding the Tuskegee Experiment was submitted to the government in 1966.

17.
The Vians observe Gem as McCoy languishes, unwilling to let her touch him and heal him: “Don't let her touch me, Jim. I can't destroy life, even if it is to save my own.”

18.
This is Cartesian dualism, writ large. See Christopher Biffle and Ronald Rubin,
A Guided Tour of René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy
(Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1989).

19.
For machines in search of a soul, see Nomad in
TOS
, “The Changeling,” and V'Ger in
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
(1979).