James White (1928–1999) was an Irish writer of science fiction whose first published story appeared in New Worlds (1953). Although White’s novels are often entertaining and engaging, he is known almost exclusively for the tales about galactic medicine comprising the Sector General sequence, set in a huge space-habitat hospital located “far out on the galactic rim” and designed to accommodate all known kinds of xenobiological problems; its facilities include a computerized universal translator. Early stories in this sequence appeared in New Worlds—the first of all being the novella “Sector General” (1957), reprinted here—and several others in New Writings in SF, which gave him a reliable home for the series. Through the first six volumes of Sector General stories and novels, Dr. Conway, a human member of the ten-thousand-strong multispecies staff, solves alone or with colleagues a series of medical crises with humor, ingenuity, and an underlying Hippocratic sense of decency; equally sympathetic alien protagonists begin to appear with volume seven.
Throughout the series, White’s capacity to conceive and make plausible a wide range of alien anatomies and their failure modes seems unflagging. The Sector General series has a strong undercurrent of pacifism (its military “Monitor Corps” exists chiefly to prevent or halt wars using nonlethal weaponry) and includes numerous instances of successful first contact achieved by giving medical aid to injured and distressed aliens, usually spacefaring ones—a trope that recurs in several of White’s nonseries stories. The hospital’s system of “educator tapes,” whereby doctors absorb the memories and skills of other-species medical experts via theoretically reversible identity transfer, is a fruitful source of complications.
The Sector General stories are underrated within the science fiction canon, perhaps because they do not depend on typical conflict or story lines for their resolution. But this is exactly what makes them unique and still fresh to this day. “Sector General” remains one of the most potent, demonstrating White’s ability to tell an engrossing story while also exploring the hospital and presenting the reader with a unique experience.