Random Thought of the Day

So, Amazon is really going to use these?

I f#$%ing hope so. I'm >this close< to surrendering my guns before I wind up on the news =p

How could this work for a story idea?

A doctor can travel back in time. Faced with difficult cases, he waits for his patient to die, then performs a thorough autopsy. With full knowledge of the cause of death and underlying issues, he travels back, prescribes the right treatment, and saves the patient he had to let die so he could find out what was wrong with them.

What if it can take several tries? How far back does he need to go? Would he get to a patient who wasn't even feeling ill because he needs to treat them at that point? If not, does he let them die?

Hmm.

Quote: Nareed

How could this work for a story idea?

A doctor can travel back in time. Faced with difficult cases, he waits for his patient to die, then performs a thorough autopsy. With full knowledge of the cause of death and underlying issues, he travels back, prescribes the right treatment, and saves the patient he had to let die so he could find out what was wrong with them.

What if it can take several tries? How far back does he need to go? Would he get to a patient who wasn't even feeling ill because he needs to treat them at that point? If not, does he let them die?

Hmm.

Pretty good idea for a moral drama. Doctor could become a hero, while no one knows he watches the same people suffer and die in order to get the results he gets.

Quote: rxwine

Pretty good idea for a moral drama. Doctor could become a hero, while no one knows he watches the same people suffer and die in order to get the results he gets.

Now imagine it takes him six or so tries to save a child, having to watch them die and then cutting them open every time... You can just imagine him yelling out in anguish and frustration at the tiny corpse "WHY do you keep dying?"

Would this make the doctor a good person or a bad one? Does it depend on why he does it? Does it depend on whom his patients are? On whom he chooses to save? He can't save everyone, after all. He must choose.

He'd start small. I think I've a scenario in mind:

Patient comes in with symptoms suggesting of appendicitis and is rushed to the OR. In the operation two things happen: 1) the patient dies from surgical complications (ALL major surgeries have a risk of death) and 2) the doctors find out they didn't have appendicitis (about 3%-5% of appendectomies turn out to be unnecessary; that's down from 20% a couple of decades ago).

The doctor finds himself travelling back in time and then....

I have a suggested title.

The Cursed Healer. The Curse of the Healer.

I mean you could make him a fame hungry sociopath, but probably more interesting to play on the torture of his own methodology and trying to live with himself.

Quote: rxwine

I have a suggested title.

The Cursed Healer. The Curse of the Healer.

That's good and descriptive, but too obvious. I like my titles to be a bit mysterious. Say "The Empathy Curse." See, if he lacked empathy, he wouldn't care if a patient dies. Something like that.

The other problem is not to make it a fantasy story. I don't think a time machine would work. So, it requires a lot of further thought.

Nobody would ever swallow the absurdity of a logicql procedure being qpplied in medicine.

This would have worked better last week:

Q: When Baltimore plays Cleveland, how can you tell who the real Browns are?

A: The real Browns lose.

Oh, that's so mean!