Alan Edward Nourse 27 min read

Told through the files of a Medical Disciplinary Board, the case of a physician charged with a grave offense on the frontier of Hospital Earth.

Alan E. Nourse's 1958 story, part of his medical-SF future, frames a first-contact drama as bureaucratic testimony from a galactic health service. Inventive, procedural golden-age SF with a strong institutional texture. Read it for a clever tale that turns interstellar medicine and its disciplinary machinery into gripping drama.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

27 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller