Star Healer

The book has it's moments -- especially the plot involving the sentient but paranoid extra terrestrial cacti species. The problem lies in the series' adherrance to a new method of classifying patients. Instead of using the taxonomy system currently in use, doctors in the future apparently have decided to use a system of letters that ends up with hard to remember and meaningless (from a reader's POV) four letter combos that distract from the flow of an otherwise interesting story.

This is the last Sector General story in which Peter Conway is the central figure. After this volume, White never again used him as the viewpoint character, and instead began experimenting with telling stories from other perspectives (just as good, let me hasten to add). At this point in his career, Conway's been a rising star among the staff of the massive interstellar hospital for years, and has had a long and successful tenure as the chief physician of the medical team of the ambulance ship Rhabwar, working with his wife (pathologist Murchison), the caterpillar-like Naydrad (whose people have no concept of deceit since their body language makes it impossible among their own kind), and the fragile Cinrusskin empath Prilicla (whose species considers deceit a survival tool in ensuring a pleasant emotional atmosphere). When Prilicla relays a summons from Chief Psychologist O'Mara, Conway realizes from his friend's agitation - and refusal to mention the details of the promotion it just received - that O'Mara has a surprise for him. Prilicla, it turns out, is replacing Conway as chief of the Rhabwar team - but Conway isn't being demoted. He's being offered promotion to Diagnostician status - the highest rank, and carrying the greatest risks, in the hospital. Not merely risks to life and limb, but to sanity; unlike physicians of lesser stature, Diagnosticians permanently carry multiple Educator tapes, those mental recordings that give them the total life experience - and assorted emotional baggage - of the alien physicians who provided them. (Rather like being possessed by several conflicting, and usually unpleasant, personalities at once, all of whom have their own ideas about everything from food to sexual partners. Diagnosticians usually can't stand to look at what they're eating because it distresses their alter egos, for example.) The job has a considerable dark side to it - especially for a happily married, reasonably content man. Rather than being asked for an immediate decision, Conway is assigned to Goglesk to consider his future without interference but without wasting time. About half the book takes place away from Sector General, as Conway works with the Goglesk contact team. While White's Galactic Federation has a non-interference directive regarding species that haven't achieved starflight, the Monitor Corps tempers it with good sense for planets suffering severe distress. Recurring characters introduced or revisited: - Danalta the shapechanger makes its first appearance among a group of trainees listening to Conway's orientation lecture, which incidentally gives new readers a primer in the classification system used to identify species. - Khone, the Gogleskan healer, reappears later in the series, as the Gogleskan problem does not have a quick and easy solution. - The Protectors of the Unborn, first introduced in AMBULANCE SHIP, take up a lot of this book, as Conway continues work on their problem.

Senior Physician Conway is happy as chief medical officer of the Ambulance Ship Rhabwar. His talented team inlcudes his beautiful wife, the second best Pathologist at Sector Twelve General Hospital; a bluntly outspoken Kelgian charge nurse, Naydrad; the frail, spiderlike empath Dr. Prilicla; and now a shape shifting alien mimic called Danalta. Then the Hospital Station's forbiding Chief Psychologist makes Conway an offer he finds difficult to refuse: A chance to join the elite that controls the Hospital. But Diagnostician status has it's drawbacks. Chief among them the necessity of sharing his mind with four or five alien entities. And of course, since this is Sector General, the crises keep coming hardly giving Conway a chance to catch his breath much less seriously address his own problems.