Super Doc

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    "Limited facility presents challenge...save greatest number of people using limited resources! Security threats...gangs...mercenary groups add additional difficulty, quite enjoyable! Plague stretched abilities to limit...couldn't have asked for more! Also enjoy saving people of course...helping the helpless...greater good...all that too."
    —Professor Mordin Solus, Mass Effect 2

    Super Doc is the only doctor in town/on the starship/in the expedition. He may have a canon field of expertise, but when called on, he can treat anything. Often in sci-fi settings, he has no nurses or other doctors to help him, sometimes with quite limited resources, and must sometimes learn and treat an alien's anatomy after about five minutes looking at it, or diagnose weird new illnesses at the drop of a hat. Even against all these odds, he usually has a high success rate. After all, he's Super Doc!

    Compare Open-Heart Dentistry, contrast Not That Kind of Doctor. A subtrope of Omnidisciplinary Scientist.

    Examples of Super Doc include:

    Anime and Manga

    • Black Jack, from the manga of the same name.
    • More Medicine Man than Doctor, Mushishi's Ginko has can recognize almost any mushi, and has a solution to nearly every Mushi-based problem the series has to offer; in both cases, usually after very little deliberation or research.
    • Doctor Bombay from Kinnikuman could undo brain damage and reattach severed limbs with ease.
    • Franken Fran, of course, can fix any medical problem, but the result is usually worse than the original problem.

    Comics

    • Dr Mid-Nite in The DCU. He has become the go-to character for any superhero requiring medical expertise. In any specialty.
    • Dr Curt Conners was the main go-to guy for any of Spider-Man's ailments or genetic mixups. When he wasn't the Lizard at the time.
    • Night Nurse[1] provides emergency medical care for superheroes when they can't go anywhere else, and seems able to treat anything from minor injuries to operating on heroes with invulnerable skin.
    • Doctor Strange is either this or Forgot About His Powers when it comes to medicine. He was a surgeon whose career ended in the 1960s, but he's still been asked to do anything from give an injection to deliver babies.

    Live Action TV

    • Any Star Trek doctor—ships' doctors, in space as at sea, have to be flexible to deal with whatever comes up far from help, but Trek doctors seem never even to struggle with the sheer breadth of medical issues facing them, only being troubled by completely new diseases and thought-impossible surgeries.
    • Any Stargate doctor.
    • Jack from Lost , as the series went on he went from applying first aid, to running a small pharmacy using drugs found on the plane, to performing amputations and blood transfusions in the jungle, with no medical equipment.
    • Babylon 5's Dr. Stephen Franklin, a xenobiologist can operate on any alien species, perform autopsies, dissect alien organisms, and so efficient at medical research he can engineer medicines to combat diseases he hadn't even heard about previously in a matter of days. He can also engineer electronic devices to interface with a telepath's mind to control telepaths up in orbit when most telepathy requires "line-of-sight".
    • In The Flash Dr. Snow is officially a bio-engineer yet as the only MD among Barry Allen's Secret Keepers, and thus the only source of treatment when he is injured during superheroics that won't cost his secret identity, she regularly performs far more surgery than her actual specialty. While The Flash has the character's Healing Factor be far more powerful than most incarnations, she treats some pretty extensive injuries and even one normal person's gunshot wound (though he almost dies before superpowered assistance is given).

    Literature

    • Discworld series:
      • Dr "Mossy" Lawn from Night Watch. And since he's the only good doctor around, he seems to go without sleep.
      • Slightly subverted in the earlier Feet of Clay; due to a lack of any competent (or trustworthy) doctors in the city, the poisoned Patrician has to rely on horse doctor "Doughnut" Jimmy. When the mob owns most of the racehorses around, a vet has to get results.
      • In Unseen Academicals, the surgical skills of The Igors is such that there is a law in Ankh-Morpork that says:

    "If it takes an Igor to bring you back, you were dead. Briefly dead, it's true, which is why the murderer will be briefly hanged."

    • Madame Pomfrey from the Harry Potter series, although having access to magical remedies does help a lot.
      • And her training is clearly meant to treat more minor (relatively) injuries. More serious cases get sent to a fully qualified hospital.
    • Aes Sedai in The Wheel of Time series have the magical means to heal almost anything short of a missing limb or death, but Nynaev has an innate medical mastery that far outstrips even those who have studied the art for decades. Early on she uses healing magic that is far more effective, though proportionately difficult, than that considered standard by the Aes Sedai (because it provides the energy for the healing rather than drawing it from the patient themselves) and eventually goes on to cure conditions such as the severing of one's ability to do magic and the madness brought on by a tainted source of magic, acts considered impossible even in the nigh-omnipotent Age of Legends.
    • James Nichols in the 1632 series, but then again, he's a doctor of 2000 in the 17th century.

    New Media

    • Celes from Descendant of a Demon Lord is an amazing healer by the standards of the setting. Part of it is she has a type of magic that only one person in the world has at any given time. In chapter 9.5 she first heard about a disease called the rot that supposedly couldn't be cured with some vague details. The disease was contagious and nasty enough that occasionally people that had it were occasionally burned alive. Celes saw someone with the disease and did a brief inspection. She was able to heal the person by pumping her unique magic into him for a minute. No opening wounds for surgery. No preparing drugs. Wasn't all great though as patient was in excruciating pain for that minute and vomited very shortly after treatment. Also that treatment isn't suitable for less healthy people. Around the same scene she saw another disease for the first time and was able to quickly devise a rather crude cure: removing all of the infected scales (potentially all of the patient's scales) and regenerating them while using a somewhat esoteric and taboo discipline of magic to drastically increase the initially small chance of survival of said surgery. That said Celes isn't the only medic in her war-band.

    Web Comics

    • The Dragon Doctors is supposed to be what happens when you have a team of different (magically-powered) doctors banding together. None of them are good at everything, but even alone, they're each capable of amazing feats of healing.
    • A more literal "Super" Doc would be Doctor McNinja, who not only specializes in bizarre medical problems (like a disease that turns people into Paul Bunyans), but also fights crime and saves the world in his spare time.
    • Schlock Mercenary - the Toughs usually had one medic in the company (until The Tailor was reprogrammed as a field surgeon). First Dr. Lazkowicz (a fugitive researcher who used to lead a top-secret project, as it turned out). Then Dr. Bunnigus.
      • Also, Miamumla "Well-flesher", the neo-Oafan medic who managed to save badly injured creatures as different from Oafa (hydrogen blimp evolved from jellyfish) as Prabstdi and Human "with just her tentacles". Later she volunteered for a cybernetic mind-linking experiment and became "meld-minister".

    Western Animation

    Video Games

    • Mordin-f**king-Solus from Mass Effect 2. Cures a bio-engineered plague in a mob-controlled Wretched Hive while three factions of gangs battle it out and try to gun their way inside his clinic just for the spite of it. Later goes on to become a chief medical officer aboard the Normandy, helping Commander Shepard save the galaxy, rarely breaking any composure.
      • Dr. Chakwas. Despite being an old woman, and the fact that humanity has only had thirty or so years' experience dealing with alien species, she knows how to treat just about any wound on any sort of species. Liara T'Soni (a 106-year-old asari scientist) is impressed at how much she knows about her species' physiology. She later proves how unflappable and determined she is by surviving the destruction of the original Normandy, leaving the Alliance just to serve aboard the illegally-constructed second Normandy, and pulling herself together after being abducted and almost liquified by the Collectors. She flat out tells you that she'll go through any sort of hell to serve at your side. How's that for Undying Loyalty?
    • Doctors in Fallout are able to casually heal your hp, broken limbs, addictions, radiation poisoning, and sometimes, even perform plastic surgery on your face.
    • Nurse Joy in any Pokémon game, at least, from a Pokemon's point of view.
    • The Medic from Team Fortress 2 has his medigun that can keep a fellow team member alive under heavy bullet rain at such a degree they'll die only via concentrated effort from the opposing team. The "Meet The Medic" video shows that if he has the peace and quiet and equipment for it, he can easily keep a patient conscious and talking without a heart.

    Real Life

    • Veterinarians. While some of them specialize in certain species (for example, horses), many are trained to treat numerous different forms of life.
    1. ↑ who actually has an MD, but acknowledges the codename is better
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