What Medical Care Does Your Space Station Have?

Now that I’ve gone through the technical areas of a fictional space station, let’s talk about the areas that deal with intelligent life, starting with medical facilities on station. Your station remains in one place and as such would most likely have more of a hospital feel to it than that of the local family doctor who can only deal with so much. Most station medical areas in books and movies can do anything from the full laboratory work up needed to diagnose a patient to the basic steps needed to heal the patient as well as dealing with anyone from newborn infant or pregnant mother to an elderly person dying of old age from any species. Often they have separate wards for different species that need special environments to survive or heal as well as at least one manually adaptable room for treating new species with the atmosphere found on the ship the alien arrived on.
I’d say that a space station is similar to a town or city now a days. As you journey across the country you pass through fields and woodland, small towns, bigger towns, and cities of all sizes. The sizes change, but every county has a hospital and every city tends to have a few hospitals and a number of clinics. An interesting thing about the city hospitals is that most of them are renowned for specific things. The Mayo Clinic a hospital systemis world renowned for its unique treatments on rare diseases while other hospitals can focus on children or research on conditions effecting specific organs that could change the future of science and medicine. Many hospitals these days also cater to cosmetic surgeries, such as reconstructing a face or merely shrinking a nose for vanity’s sake, and there are even pet hospitals in many cities now. Modern medicine can do many things and most hospitals in large cities can accommodate anything or can quickly get the patient to the correct hospital. It may be beneficial to at least decide what the limits of your medical facilities are before you write a lot of scenes in the medical wards.
Another thing to consider is that every doctor has his or her specialty whether it’s dealing with children, a specific alien species, or prefers diseases to dealing with broken limbs. Knowing the doctor’s specialty and their reason for learning that specialty can do a lot towards creating the character for story purposes if the doctor isn’t a major character in your story. (A scene where an animal doctor is forced to heal a human or alien could be a fun scene to read and write. I know I can think of many other examples where a doctor’s training doesn’t prepare him or her for an emergency could create an interesting scene with nervous tension or near panic.)
One final thought on medicine on a space station comes from the Babylon 5 television series. It was set on a space station that had its main doctor have a specialty in zenobiology, or the study of non-human life. I would guess that zenobiology would be a common focus or hobby of many doctors that would choose to work on a space station instead of a possibly better paying job planet-side somewhere.