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"Who needs a real doctor when you got my machines and their scary needles?"
"Doctor" Zed's Med Vendor, Borderlands

In The Future or sometime soon, you won't need a steady hand of a doctor to heal people, a sophisticated machine is doing that for you. In a futuristic setting there will be computerized or robotic devices that can diagnose conditions, cure diseases, heal wounds, and operate on human bodies automatically. If a human doctor is participating in it at all, he will only press buttons and won't even touch a needle or scalpel.

The appearance of these machines can range from a complex electronic and robotic apparatus to seemingly magic circles. Healing Vat is its own Sub-Trope.

Note: There is a difference between this and Save/Heal points in video games. Unless the healing effect is referred to In-universe, it's an Acceptable Break from Reality.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • In Birdy the Mighty, the title character can soak in a special tank to heal from her injuries.
  • Dragon Ball Z: Freeza's forces use the Medical Machine, though it's actually the liquid inside them that does the work. As of Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F', the latest model is sophisticated enough to completely reconstruct Freeza from the diced chunks of meat he was turned into by Future Trunks after he is wished back from being vaporized.
  • Gall Force: When Lufy is brought into the analysis station operated by Spea, they just move her into a chamber and press some buttons to restart her heart from a state of suspended animation. Spea mentions offhand that there are several injuries that may require organ replacement.
  • The Law of Ueki has Heavenly Beasts that release a healing machine which fully restores anyone inside it for exactly 10 minutes. However, if the healing process is interrupted in any way and the machine is damaged, the person inside it will die.

    Comic Books 
  • The Condemned Legionnaires shows a planet called "quarantine world" where people with dangerous illnesses are sent to get cured or spend their last days peacefully as they are treated by large robo-nurses.
  • Sabretooth & the Exiles: Bordering on horror, as Dr. Barrington has a hovering robot surgeon, a spider-like drone with scalpel-tipped limbs, which carries our operations on some of her mutant prisoners. Some of them are Strapped to an Operating Table and aren't sedated first.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 
  • Baymax in Big Hero 6 is a big, soft, friendly, and huggable robot medic. He can perform a full medical scan in seconds, has an extensive database of medical procedures, defibrillators in his hands, and antibiotic sprays in his fingers. Notably, he also upgrades to include mental health treatments when he realizes that Hiro is going through emotional trauma.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Alien:
    • Prometheus has one which also serves as a Chekhov's Gun. Dr. Shaw has to hastily have it perform a rapid c-section to remove the rapidly growing alien fetus, all while she is awake and not well-anesthetized. Shaw initially requests a cesarean but is denied as the machine is calibrated for male patients (this is foreshadowing for the reveal that Peter Weyland is on board). She quickly thinks to request an abdominal foreign body removal instead.
    • A version is seen in the original Alien movie as well — despite taking place later in the timeline, it's not efficient enough to identify the alien growing inside a crewmember, though that may have been due to deliberate sabotage... Also, it could be the difference between the version sent on a $2 trillion dollar exploration mission and the version sent with a bulk freighter. The novelization of Alien actually calls it "the autodoc" by name.
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron has one of these called the cradle. It heals wounds by printing synthetic tissue and bonding it to someone's cells. It's first used on Hawkeye, but its main contribution to the plot is creating a body for Ultron.
  • Elysium: The medical pods are the closest thing the future has to a panacea. They can heal every disease known to man (as stated in Armadyne's Alternate Reality Game website), cancer, broken bones, and leukemia. They're so powerful that they can even repair Kruger's face, most of which was blown off by a point-blank grenade.
  • The machine used to "repair" Leeloo in The Fifth Element. It actually reconstructs her from what is essentially a bone fragment containing living cells.
  • Idiocracy has semi-automatic medical stations. The probes have to be inserted by person, which gets awkward when that person gets confused on which probes should be used on which hole...
  • In Jason X, Jason is finally put down by having his head blown apart. Unfortunately, they had the misfortune of shooting him into an autodoc first, and the damaged machine fixed him up better than new.
  • The Avalon in Passengers (2016) has one autodoc that is referred to by name. However, after giving a diagnosis, it needs an authorized medical technician (or a senior crewman's override) to provide a prognosis or apply treatment.
  • Starship Troopers places an injured Rico in a nutrient tank with automated metal hands mending his thigh wound. Another scene also includes an auto-tattooer.
  • Star Wars:

    Jokes 
  • A guy goes to the doctor to get his tennis-elbow treated. The nurse tells him to provide a urine sample, and he does, despite not seeing what that has to do with a simple elbow exam. Five minutes later, he goes in to see the doctor, who perfectly diagnoses his problem before he can bring it up. The doctor then explains that he's recently acquired a machine that can tell exactly what's wrong with a patient so long as it can analyze the patient's urine sample. Skeptical, the guy tells his family the next day about the machine, and they all decide to have fun with the doctor; the guy, his wife and teenage daughter all pee in a bottle, then the guy catches a few drops of oil from the bottom of his car into the bottle, then he jerks off and adds his semen, shakes up the bottle, goes back to the doctor's office and hands in the bottle. Half an hour later, the doctor gives the guy a nasty look and says he's got bad news — the daughter's pregnant, the wife's got an STI, the car's about to throw a rod, and if the guy doesn't stop wanking, his tennis-elbow will never heal.

    Literature 
  • The Andromeda Strain has a fancy couch which performs all the blood tests and immunizations the staff of Project Wildfire require — all powered by the height of '60s computer technology.
  • Childe Cycle: In "Warrior", there's a Medical Mech, a mobile dog-sized device with metal tentacles that will automatically provide medical aid when it senses anyone's heartbeat is in trouble.
  • Deathworld: Jason dinAlt has a medikit that diagnoses injuries and illnesses and automatically injects the proper drugs to treat them.
  • The Expanse features extremely capable automatic medical technology on board Martian-designed military ships, capable of handling severely broken bones, radiation sickness, cancer, vacuum exposure and even regrowing most of a hand.
  • Homes on the Great Ship usually have an Autodoc. They serve mostly to augment the Healing Factor of the Greatship's Transhuman inhabitants, or to repair extensive genetic damage.
  • In Hinterlands by William Gibson, one of the astronauts who has Gone Mad from the Revelation fools the surgical manipulator (which is programmed against suicide) into dissecting her.
  • Known Space contains the Trope Namer and is possibly the Trope Codifier, if not the Ur-Example.
    • Introduced in the short story "The Ethics of Madness". Small desk autodocs can't repair injuries, but they can test blood samples and inject needed vitamins and drugs, provided that they're pre-supplied with them (the small ones are explicitly intended for personal use; an autodoc for a diabetic would have a supply of insulin that's renewed periodically by a service technician, but one for a non-diabetic wouldn't). There are larger public autodocs that have a much broader variety of supplies. Eventually, the ARM develops military-grade portable autodocs equipped with boosterspice, the setting's longevity drug.
    • The setting has coffin-sized autodocs (the person is simply placed inside) that can pretty much fix anything, though starship-based versions are mostly used to cure hangovers and give pedicures and haircuts. The only requirement for it to restore someone to perfect health (including youth) is that they be alive on entry — and even that has plenty of wiggle room.
    • The short story "Procrustes" introduces Carlos Wu's upgraded autodoc, which uses nanomachines and is basically a Deus ex machina. Given sufficient time, raw material, and the right programming, this device can cure anything: punctures, infections, old age at the genetic level, even the total destruction of Beowulf Shaffer's body, leaving only a decapitated head. After an upgrade by two Protectors (basically mutated super genius humans,) the device also becomes capable of patching plot holes: The Ringworld becomes self-repairing and gets Quantum II Hyperdrive, which now works inside a gravity well. This particular autodoc can even revert a Protector back into a normal human.
  • The Liaden Universe adopts the Known Space model, although later books in the series imply that they are at least partially Lost Technology.
  • The Murderbot Diaries has wound packs that are wrapped on like a bandage, but also diagnose an injury and inject painkillers and antibiotics. There are robotic gurneys that have the same functions. Spaceships and habitats have a MedSystem that acts like the usual version of this trope. In Artificial Condition, Sapient Ship ART uses its MedSystem to surgically modify Murderbot so he'll look like an augmented human instead of a rogue SecUnit. In Network Effect, a Contagious A.I. is able to take over ART using a Zombie Infectee patient; ART has the patient placed in the MedSystem and scanned, which copies the hostile AI into itself.
  • The Polity: These devices range from breadbox-sized to as tall as a man, and all unerringly designed to look quite disturbing when they are active; more often described as a cross between a chrome Samurai and a cockroach with far too many limbs. They literally slice you open and perform major surgeries — usually whilst the patient is conscious, by using a device called a nerve-blocker that prevents pain from being transmitted to the brain — and seemingly can repair most life-threatening injuries, as well as remove tumors, perform cosmetic repairs to facial injuries, weld bone and cellular material back together, and can even manufacture replacement parts if required.
  • The surgeon about to operate on the human senator in "Segregationist" is revealed as a Metallo; a robot with human rights. The medical engineer is implied to be one, too, but it isn't clearly stated either way.
  • In The Ship Who... Searched, seven-year-old Tia Cade is regularly left alone while her parents work. As she's a Child Prodigy with a library on hand, food synthesizers, and a medical unit controlled by a primitive AI, this is seen as fine, even when her parents stay away for weeks on end. But when she goes to it with the first signs of a mysterious paralysis, it doesn't know what to make of it and suggests to Tia that she might want to talk to someone about being abandoned, which could lead to taking her away from her totally great life. So she stops consulting it. By the time her parents decide to talk to her again, she's in a terrible state.
  • Slingshot: These are common on smaller ships, especially military ones. They seem to be mostly of the diagnose-and-instruct-a-human variety, though they can autonomously administer drugs once a patient is in their care.
  • In Alastair Reynolds' Slow Bullets, the passengers of a malfunctioning Sleeper Starship reactivate its thousand-year-old autodoc to save a stabbed man. The autodoc operates normally, then suffers a memory glitch and begins to operate on the table below him. The man does not survive this process.
  • Star Wars Legends provides more models of medical droid and more details on their advantages and disadvantages: medical droids can have a near-limitless knowledge of sentient species to let them heal the massive variety of patients in the galaxy, and they often have a precision that only a machine could have during surgery. On the flip side, their bedside manner often left something to be desired and led to patients not trusting a droid to operate on them and very few droids (such as the 21B from The Empire Strikes Back) being intelligent enough to deal with unforeseen complications and side effects. In consequence, they're usually used as assistants to an organic doctor that oversees their activities, in order to select a proper treatment.
  • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: Barney Mayerson consults a computer psychiatrist called Dr. Smile that's carried around in a suitcase (linked to a Master Computer).
  • The Time Traders: One of the devices on an alien ship is a cradle filled with a healing jelly. Spending time in the jelly quickly cures all wounds you've taken.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Blake's 7: In "Volcano", Avon gets a futuristic splint put on his arm that apparently heals the broken bone as well. However, in "Breakdown" when Blake suggests using their Magical Computer Zen and the Liberator's advanced medical facilities to treat Gan's malfunctioning brain implant, Avon derides the idea and insists they find a proper neurosurgeon. In "Headhunter", Scorpio is shown to have a medicapsule that is used to put a wounded man in suspended animation.
  • Doctor Who:
    • In "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances", Captain Jack Harkness's Chula warship is full of nanogenes that automatically heal anyone on board. It turns out that The Virus that's turning people into gas-masked zombies is from the same source, these nanogenes ones from a battlefield ambulance performing Anatomically Ignorant Healing due to unfamiliarity with humans.
    • In "The End of Time", the Immortality Gate (not named by its makers) is similar in that Bad Things™ happen when you give it the wrong template. So don't let the Master get his hands on one... oops.
    • In "The Curse of the Black Spot", this turns out to be the Siren's true purpose. She's been abducting pirates who are in any way injured to fix them up.
    • In "The Girl Who Waited", the Handbots serve this purpose in the Kindness Facility, administering medicine to the residents. Amy has real trouble with them, though, as they are programmed so they don't believe she's not Apalapucian due to a planetary quarantine, and she has to constantly avoid and/or deactivate them so they don't give her medicine that could be lethal.
  • In The Expanse, ships like the Rocinante feature auto-docs that slip over a patient's upper arm to diagnose and dispense medication. At one point Amos has to keep manually overriding an auto-doc because the patient is in such bad shape the device tries to default to "hospice mode". For physical wounds, however, a human still has to carry out procedures manually.
  • Grey's Anatomy: One episode has one of the doctors use a robot to perform surgery. See the Real Life section below.
  • Look Around You brings us Medibot, the first ever machine qualified to automatically perform surgeries. One of the hosts decides to test this new technology on himself by having it give him a facelift...the results of which, to put it mildly, suggests that Medibot is still not quite suited for life-saving surgeries.
  • The Orville: In the season three episode "A Tale Of Two Topas", Isaac reveals that he is this. Because of his abilities to learn even the most complex skills in under a second, he's capable of learning medical procedures such as a sex change surgery. Isaac is shown to be this in earlier episodes as well, as he's capable of monitoring a biological being's vitals and of performing first aid (such as when he reset Marcus' dislocated knee in "Into The Fold").
  • The Red Dwarf episode "Fathers and Suns" reveals that there is an AI dentist on board the Red Dwarf. Unfortunately, it is as well programmed as the rest of the computers built by the Jupiter Mining Corp — which is to say, not very. It is perfectly happy to perform dentistry on an individual even when it has run out of dental anesthetic.
  • Stargate SG-1:
    • Goa'uld sarcophagi. These are so effective that they can bring people back to life. At least, those who are recently considered dead by He's Dead, Jim standards. We don't know just how dead you can be; there may be a difference between someone who was recently shot and someone dead for years or reduced to Ludicrous Gibs. Most of the cast would not have lasted very long without one lying around (and not well-guarded) during Goa'uld encounters. However, there's a downside. If you're already in good health, they start making "improvements". Unfortunately, addiction and megalomania come with that package, to the point where the non-evil-overlord branch of the species avoids using them. For some reason, after we learn that it's bad news if used when healthy, it begins to be treated by the cast as if it's evil no matter what. You would really think the Tok'ra and the SGC would keep one nearby and just not let people who weren't injured play with it (and give one to Atlantis) but of course that would solve too many problems too easily.
    • Goa'uld healing devices are a less powerful example, able to heal many injuries but there are limits. Using one requires that naquadah be present in one's blood. Control appears to be mental in nature. Presumably the device itself knows what and how to heal.
    • The Ancient technology sarcophagi are based on, which resembles a cube small enough to carry two-handed, heals anything near it when activated. Unfortunately, non-Ancient corpses tend to come back as regenerative zombies.
  • Technically, the Medical Holograms of Star Trek are this. Of course, they tend to end up as persons if you keep them running for long periods of time, they still have use of biologicals helping out (as nurses, if not necessarily as doctors), and due to the whole hologram thing, they look like a human doctor and need the same tools as a human doctor to do medicine. Still, they are machines (holo-emitters combined with a complicated program) designed to heal people without any doctor to help out.

    Podcasts 

    Radio 
  • In Earthsearch, the Challenger has surgical androids, though in the series they're used more as a Do-Anything Robot because their dexterity means they can be reprogrammed for tasks like piloting the spaceship or firing weapons.

    Tabletop Games 
  • BattleTech:
    • Advanced battle armor have built-in autodocs; the suit with cauterize wounds, pump the user with morphine, and self-seal the suit against environmental hazards. Clan Elemental powerarmor is famous in-universe for being nigh-invulnerable against infantry weapons, and there's situations where an Elemental will have half of his limbs blown up only to keep fighting.
    • BattleMech mechwarriors and Aerospace pilots can use a piece of equipment called a Medipack to automatically inject stimulants and morphine for combat.
  • In the Battlelords of the 23rd Century supplement Lock-N-Load: The Battlelord's War Manual:
    • One piece of optional equipment for high-tech body armor is the Auto Doc. It keeps track of the wearer's vital signs, diagnoses their injuries and automatically injects appropriate drugs to heal them.
    • The Brain Surgery Unit is a high-tech helmet that can be slipped onto the head of someone with brain injuries. It creates a sterile field, scans the subject and uses micro-lasers to perform surgery on the subject's brain.
    • An item that can be bought for the home is the Surgery Unit (automated). When an injured person is put inside it, it can automatically perform surgery on them at skill level 15.
  • One item of technology in Buck Rogers XXVC is Autosurgery, which can perform any type of surgery needed.
  • Champions:
    • Gadgets supplement:
      • The Autopepper is a device worn on the body. If the wearer falls unconscious, it will inject a stimulant that can bring the wearer back to consciousness and help the wearer recover lost STUN and BODY damage.
      • The Quikfix Autodoc Unit is installed in superhero headquarters and villain/agent bases. It automatically uses the Healing power on any injured being placed inside it.
    • Several adventures have medical facilities operated by the base Artificial Intelligence as standard equipment in super headquarters/bases.
  • Cyberpunk:
    • In the supplement Home of the Free, the Automedic is put on top of a patient and immediately goes to work: diagnosing problems, stabilizing the patient, treating wounds, injecting drugs etc.
    • In the Pacific Rim Sourcebook, the Japanese Type 15 MBT (main battle tank) has a built-in Auto-medkit for its crew.
  • In GDW's Dark Conspiracy supplement Darktek:
    • The Antidoter is a Darktek device that is attached to a creature's skin. When any poison enters the creature's body, the Antidoter analyzes it, creates an antidote and injects it into the creature's body to negate the poison. The side effect is that the user has to eat two pounds of raw meat for each minute the device operates.
    • The Rejuvenator is a Darktek device that heals any injured creature put inside of it. It can stabilize critical wounds, halve the time needed to heal, and regenerate lost body parts. Unfortunately, it also makes the recipient more vulnerable to Dark Minion mind control.
  • "Healing Vats" are the oldest and most common forms of medical nanotechnology in Eclipse Phase. They can regenerate a lost limb in about twelve hours and restore a severed head's body in a week or two.
  • FTL: 2448: In the year 2448, medical science has developed several types of autodocs that can perform various sorts of medical procedures on patients. These include first aid, administering treatments (antibiotics, anti-viral drugs, poison antidotes, etc.), setting bones, minor and major surgery, re-growing body parts, reversing aging and genetic engineering.
  • Gamma World: When a Medi-Kit is placed over a wound, it takes a blood sample, injects any necessary drugs, sutures wounds, gives verbal directions on how to handle any conditions it cannot, and sprays on an antiseptic dressing.
  • GURPS Ultra-Tech has several versions for different Technology Levels, from the TL9 Automed (a sealed trauma pod with automated functions, but which needs advice from a real doctor if anything unexpected happens) to the TL12 Medical Bush Robot, which has multiple medical instruments on its fractal "branchesstar" enabling it to perform any surgery.
  • The Hollow Earth Expedition supplement Secrets of the Surface World has an Auto-Doctor as a possible Weird Science gadget.
  • In Laserburn Sci-Fi Combat Rules (1980), when attached to a wounded person, the Automedic device will repair severed arteries, administer needed drugs and so on.
  • In the Mage: The Ascension sourcebook Technomancer's Toybox, there's a device that was created by a Tradition mage in a moment of mad desperation. Stick in an injured person, no matter how badly hurt, pump it full of quintessence, and maybe they'll be perfectly healed—or maybe you'll need a hose to clean it out. It's a 50/50 chance.
  • The Morrow Project:
    • M1 CBR Detector/Treatment Kit. This device can detect the presence of any poison (dangerous chemical) in the area. If it is pressed against the skin, it will automatically inject the antidote to any poison(s) it has detected.
    • When pressed against a wound or the skin, a medkit will automatically read the patient's vital signs, treat small wounds, close major wounds and inject/spray antitoxins, antibiotics, coagulants, pain relievers, sleep inducers or stimulants as necessary.
    • Med Units are large, enclosed beds with medical support equipment. They have a biocomputer which performs automatic diagnosis and treatment.
  • Mutant Future:
    • When placed over a wound and activated, Healing Packs send out a wave of healing radiation that closes wounds, mends broken bones, replaces lost tissue, etc.
    • Encasing Military Armors have the Battle Doc 6000 system, which acts like a Healing Pack on the Armor's wearer.
    • Regeneration Tanks are filled with a special regenerative chemical that heals damaged organs and wounds. There are rumors about a special kind of Regeneration Tank that can bring people back from the dead if used within 24 hours of death.
  • Paranoia has the DocBots, tireless robotic medical personnel of Alpha Complex intended to see to all the clones' problems. They can inject any needed drug, analyze biochemical samples, and perform surgery. The largest ones can act as intensive care wards. Predictably, they are about as reliable as most Alpha Complex robots at best and stark raving insane at worst.
  • Phoenix Command:
    • A Combat Suit will constrict around wounds to limit bleeding and will inject the drug Oxyspan if the wearer is near death.
    • Power Armor has the benefits of a Combat Suit plus a built-in Auto-Medic Kit.
  • Rifts has a number of variations on the technology, including tiny robots the size of a shirt button that can suture wounds, Nanomachines that can remain in your system to fix internal injuries, and the harness worn by Juicers that constantly monitors and keeps their physique at Super-Soldier levels—at least until they inevitably burn out and die.
  • In the Rolemaster setting supplement Shadow World:
    • In Kingdom of the Desert Jewel, the Bed of Suspension is a magical version that appears in a tomb in the Halls of the Mountain King. It is an intelligent coffin of ruby red stone that can diagnose the injuries of anyone put in it and cast healing spells to cure their ills.
    • In the Jaiman: Land of Twilight adventure "The Tomb of Andraax", the Medical Center has "medbeds": automated surgical/medical facilities that activate when a body is placed in them. They can cure almost any injury excepting severe brain damage or loss of a major body part.
  • In Shadowrun, many medical devices are run either on automatic or by remote.
  • Gamescience's Space Patrol (1977) has the Medikit, which is strapped to its owner's wrist or waist and constantly monitors its wearer's well-being. When something goes wrong with their body, it injects any needed drugs to remedy the situation.
  • Starblazer Adventures, based on the 1980s British science fiction comic book:
    • A starship's Med-Bay system included a medical computer system capable of diagnosing and treating injuries.
    • Mindjammer campaign setting. The Biomed Suit could synthesize drugs (anesthetics, antiseptic, etc.), blood and skin and use them to perform first aid on the person wearing it. This could stabilize the patient and promote healing.
  • In FASA's Star Trek: The Roleplaying Game supplement Star Trek: The Next Generation First Year Sourcebook, the Federation has diagnostic beds that can perform a number of procedures on patients, such as dispensing intravenous drugs and stimulating the heart and lung systems.
  • The various Star Wars RPGs put out through the years — from West End Games, Wizards of the Coast, and Fantasy Flight Games — all have the various med paks, medical droids, and bacta tanks found in the Star Wars universe. There are also ways you could play as a medical droid.
  • Terran Trade Authority:
    • The Medsuit is a garment worn under other clothing. It has a VS (Vital Signs) pack that monitors its wearer's blood pressure, heart rate, brain activity and other medical information. If the VC pack detects medical problems in its wearer, it can inject appropriate drugs as needed. If the wearer loses a limb or part of one (hand, foot), it will clamp down, preventing further blood loss.
    • The MekDoc is a robot designed to perform all kinds of medical procedures on a patient, up to and including surgery. It can diagnose problems, dose patients with drugs, change wound dressings, etc.
  • Traveller:
    • The Classic supplement Merchants and Merchandise by Paranoia Press has the AutoDoc Independent Medical Treatment Center. It can perform first aid, minor operations and dental work, diagnose diseases, and inject drugs and antitoxins as needed.
    • Digest Group Publications supplement 101 Robots:
      • The Battle Medibot can inject medications into and bandage and suture the wounds of its patient.
      • The Ambulance Attendant Medibot can perform almost any emergency medical procedure, including reviving heart attack victims, assisting at birth and treating traumatic wounds.
      • The LSP Robodoc 400 and KT21 Medical Expert Robot can perform operations on patients without supervision.
      • The LSP Medibooth (Automatic Medical Booth Robot) can diagnose diseases, perform physical exams, conduct medical tests, dispense medications and treat minor injuries.
    • In the Space Gamer #67 adventure "Interdiction Station", the sickbay of the title space station has an autodoc that can be programmed to perform surgical operations.
    • In the Mongoose version, Autodocs are one of the basic classes of robot and often installed on ships.
    • The New Era main rules has the Automed. It can monitor the patient's vital signs, inject needed medication and try to resuscitate a patient with low vital signs.
  • In SPI's Universe, a Medical Pod computer can diagnose and treat a patient by itself as if it were a highly skilled doctor.

    Video Games 
  • In Alien: Resurrection, you must find and use one of these after getting facehugged to prevent death by chestburster.
  • Once a prototype for a line of LLC nanny-bots, Kid Ultra from Battleborn is hardwired to lend a helping hand. He's the pinnacle of LLC support technology, programmed with all sorts of gadgets to assist or subdue a target as he sees fit.
  • The BioShock series has automated health stations. They charge you cash, but will completely heal you, however enemies can also use them. You can also hack them so they'll give you a discount and kill any enemies who try to heal with it. Destroying them causes them to drop first aid kits.
  • In the Borderlands series, people rely on vending machines such as the one pictured above to dispense medicine and health-restoration injectors, as well as shields and class mods. The ones on Pandora in the first game, Borderlands, and Borderlands 2 are owned and operated by the notoriously shady Doctor Zed, who apparently managed to snag a local monopoly despite his lack of a medical license (to be fair, the medicines he sells do work perfectly well). The ones on Elpis and in Helios in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, on the other hand, are run by the somewhat more reputable Nurse Nina.
  • Chrono Trigger has in its ruined future a device called an Enertron which gives you a whole night's sleep within a few seconds... but it does nothing to replenish your state of hunger when you first enter. Chrono Cross references this briefly later on.
  • In Civilization: Beyond Earth, the Clinic buildings available on newly colonized worlds are stated to consist mainly of drug dispensers, surgical robots, scanners, and other automated systems, with only one or two trained doctors and a handful of nursing staff. This is sufficient to meet the most well-known needs in a small community — qualified human doctors and nurses are extremely valuable assets, and their efforts are wasted treating common illnesses and injuries, but they can be called in for anything more complicated than the automated systems can handle. This is the first Health-generating building, based on humanitarian clinics developed on Earth That Used to Be Better to treat refugees and slum-dwellers — further developments are more straightforward examples of this trope.
  • In Dawn of War, Eldar Webway Gates can be upgraded to provide a healing aura.
  • Deus Ex features healing robots that can heal the player fully without using resources and can perform surgery to install augmentations. Notably, Deus Ex is on a much lower-tech level than most examples, taking place in 2052, with the only other technological advancement over the 2000s being limited human augmentation and attack robots. The presence of doctors near the robots implies that the robots aren't able to treat everything, and the JC Denton's ability to use them for healing and surgery may be due to his use of nano-augmentations.
  • Doom³ has wall-mounted Health Stations all around the UAC bases. These contain various amounts of Hit Points (from 40 up to 100, most commonly 75 and 50) that are administered 10 at a time when interacted with.
  • Doom (2016) has small machines that you can put your arm in to get fully healed with an apparently unpleasant injection of some kind of fluid, which also show up (rarely) in Doom Eternal. Given that the Doom Slayer also heals by tearing apart his enemies, it could be inferred that his healing factor is much better than a baseline human. The auto-injectors also include a note that people shouldn't use it repeatedly, or at all if they can help it.
  • Escape from Butcher Bay features NanoMED Plus stations which will inject a user with nanomachines to repair injuries nearly instantly. In Riddick's own words, "Takes away the hurt, leaves the pain."
    "NanoMED Plus: We treat you right when the world treats you rough."
  • In Evolve, there are mechanical diagnosis and treatment units called autodocs. Organic doctors do still exist though, as the machines can still misdiagnose patients and tend to side with practicality rather than empathy.
  • In the Fallout series' Alternate History lore, one of the atomic-powered Old World society's finest creations were machines called Auto-Docs, which first appeared (rarely) in Fallout 2. For the most part, they seem to work pretty well, capable of healing major and minor injuries effectively, but after 200+ years following a nuclear apocalypse, A.I. Is a Crapshoot takes full effect.
    • In Fallout 2, the Brotherhood of Steel has a medical AI named ACE (Artificial Conscious Entity) that works through Healing Vats.
    • Also in the second game, the doctor in the slums of Vault City mostly relies on an Autodoc that he received from the citizens in Vault City. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly given the practices of the citizens, malfunctioning, and cannot be used for anything more than basic healing, and the doctor isn't sufficiently trained enough to fix it. If you manage to fix it, however, it will be fully-functional. And you will piss off the citizens of Vault City.
    • In Fallout: New Vegas, the man named Caesar heads up the Legion, an explicitly technophobic group of tribals formed around being an Expy of the Roman Empire, to the point of refusing using anything more advanced than basic rifles, a motorized grinding wheel, and at least one chainsaw. Should the Courier actually want to work with the Legion to the point of being allowed into Caesar's tent, they discover that he owns a malfunctioning Auto-Doc mounted to the foot of his bed to help maintain his declining health. Progressing the Legion's questline far enough also reveals that Caesar suffers from a brain tumor and only a successful operation will be able to save him. Repairing the Auto-Doc is one way to ensure his survival... or his death.
      • In the Dead Money add-on, the Courier finds Christine Royce trapped inside one modified to perform surgery on her vocal chords to make her sound like a long-dead lounge singer as part of a plot to break into the hotel's sealed vault. Several other Auto-Docs are scattered around the Sierra Madre, and due to the lack of real doctors in the deathtrap of a city, the Courier will be relying on them for health, limb repair, and (especially in Hardcore mode) relief of hunger, thirst, and exhaustion.
      • In the Old World Blues add-on, the player home of the Sink houses an Auto-Doc with a virtual personality that serves as the best physician in-game, able to add enhancing implants, replace surgically-removed organs, perform psychological evaluations (and by extension of that feature, cure nearsightedness for Four Eyed players), offer standard health check-ups, perform plastic surgery, and give haircuts. If the Doc's left on, a Courier with Good Karma learns that he eventually finds a way to turn off the Y-17 Trauma Harnesses, freeing the corpses trapped inside. The DLC also features Mr. Orderly robots, Mr. Handy variants actually designed for medical procedures and surgery — unfortunately, by the time the Courier finds them, they've all long since gone hostile.
    • Fallout 3 has the My First Infirmary in your house, which could heal everything short of addiction. It also has a Mr. Handy and Mr. Gutsy robots standing in for doctors, though they prove to be incompetent as doctors. Mr. Handy is a general-purpose servant and maintenance robot complete with a grabber, a buzz saw, a blowtorch, and a butler-y posh British accent. Mr. Gutsy is a US Army variant, though he keeps the grabber, he trades the blowtorch for a military-grade flamethrower, the buzz saw for a light plasma weapon, and the butler voice for a Drill Sergeant Nasty voice. Andy is a Mr. Handy who attempts to treat a sprained toe by amputating the wrong leg, and Sawbones is a Mr. Gutsy programmed with extensive medical knowledge, but not programmed to use it. Upon asking him for medical attention, he prefers to hurt you instead unless you fix the bug allowing him to do that and making him into an excellent doctor, although he's very unhappy about that.
    • In Fallout 4, Vault 81 has a modified Miss Nanny robot called the CVRIE: Contagious Vulnerability Robotic Infirmary Engineer, or simply "Curie". Unlike the examples from Fallout 3 she is very good at her job and very happy to help. She later downplays this trope when her AI is transferred into a synth body.
  • FTL: Faster Than Light's Med Bay explicitly works by automatically pumping the patient full of healing nanomachines, no human (or alien) operator required. The Engi ship comes with an augment that allows these nanomachines to be pumped into the ship's life support system and offer (somewhat slower) healing throughout the ship, and a weapon system can be found that packs the nanomachines into a bomb that can be teleported onto an enemy ship to heal boarding parties mid-operation. Transporters can also be upgraded to fully heal crewmembers during teleportation.
  • Final Fantasy VIII has a variation; the Phoenix Guardian Force is the only one that can't be summoned normally, but will randomly auto-summon to revive your entire party after they've all died, denying a Game Over.
  • Frostpunk includes Automatons, machines that tower over whole buildings on four long legs and seem to feature a suite of manipulators and instruments in their bodies which they use by "sitting" on top of a building and inserting them from above, thereby replacing entire work crews. After researching (or being given in an event) Medical Automatrons, these huge contraptions can be assigned to Infirmaries and Medical Posts, thus replacing the human Engineers that would normally staff these buildings and implying this trope.
  • Both Half-Life and Half-Life 2 have first aid stations, which heal you, and similar-looking HEV stations, which recharge your HEV suit. The first game also has a robotic surgery machine in one of the research labs which has become a makeshift Robotic Torture Device.
  • The final level of Hitman (2016) takes place in a Hospital Paradiso built with a sophisticated AI that can use a high-tech robotic surgical suite to aid in delicate medical procedures. One of your targets is set to be operated on by said robotic suite, which can be used to dispatch the target, either by injecting corrupted stem cells, draining their blood, electrocuting them with an overcharged defibrillator, or sabotaging the AI and letting it do the deed.
  • The battle armor in MechWarrior: Living Legends, a combined arms simulation game based off of BattleTech, has the same autodoc as the boardgame's. Battle armor will regenerate their health by dispensing "harjel" to seal holes in the armor, and messages on the battle armor's visor will note when morphine is being administered - such as when the visor is completely covered in blood and oil.
  • Mother has the Instant Revitalizing Machine. It's created by Dr. Andonuts in EarthBound (1994) and later appears in Mother 3, used by the Pigmask Army, with a different design and appearing more frequently than it does in EarthBound, Foreshadowing that Dr. Andonuts is now working with the Pigmask Army.
  • In Nightshade (1992), there's a healing booth in the superhero Vortex's cave. Nightshade is allowed in only after gaining sufficiency notoriety with his heroics.
  • The Alien Medpack from Perfect Dark is required to revive Elvis (a Grey) from his comatose state before you can escape Area 51 with him. It takes about a minute to work on him.
  • The Pokémon games do this with the Healing Machine in Pokemon Centers. In Colosseum and XD, there are even self-service versions that you don't need a nurse to operate for you.
  • Prey (2017) has autodocs in the form of medical operators, flying robots that can heal a wide variety of conditions.
  • Space Colony has medibays. While they need to be 'prepped' by a colonist, they operate automatically after this. It seems that anesthetic is not included, given the noises made by the colonists using them.
  • In Automated Simulations' game Star Warrior, your character's armor contained a medical subsystem, which would automatically heal some of your damage each turn as long as it was operational.
  • Stormland has a robot-fixing-robots examples, with you regularly coming across workstations that restores your health in-between fighting enemies. One shows up right in the first two minutes of gameplay to repair your badly damaged right arm.
  • Subnautica: You can find an audio log from a doctor who says that all medicine now just involves pressing a couple buttons. This is why he didn't feel guilty about cheating to get his medical license. That is, until he found himself stranded on an alien planet and the other survivors expected him to actually know what he was doing.
  • The intro movie for Syndicate shows the Vitruvian Device, which holds someone in a ring and can perform surgery instantly, which in the video is used to replace a leg with a cybernetic version in less time than it took for you to read this sentence.
  • System Shock and System Shock 2 have automatic medical beds that heal you completely in an instant. They also have Quantum Bio-Reconstruction Machines that will reanimate "killed" characters, though these need to be reset so they won't turn them into more cyborgs instead.
  • Team Fortress 2:
    • The Engineer's Dispenser will heal nearby teammates and provide ammo for them.
    • The Medigun is a mobile version of this; just aim it at a wounded teammate, pull the trigger, and it will automatically heal your "target" (regardless of how bad your aim is) using a not-quite-magic gas that near-instantly heals pretty much anything that doesn't kill you. It also has an "Übercharge" function, meaning that healing people builds up a Limit Break depending on which Medigun you use, e.g., temporary invincibility for you and one teammate.
  • In Xenosaga II, Jin Uzuki mentions that such machines have taken over most of the doctors' duty, with the doctors (he included) now essentially being counselors.

    Web Animation 
  • Dreamscape: The doctors in Megalania's hospital are these creepy-looking robots, but it's all legit.

    Webcomics 
  • Data Chasers: Lynn Tailor nearly lost her eggs (and more than likely her ovaries as well) due to a faulty Autodoc. A real doctor showed up and turned it off.
  • In Escape from Terra, most households on Mars or Ceres supposedly have one that can repair a shot through the heart if gotten to soon enough. They're illegal on Terra, though, due to their ban on biotech and nanotech.
  • Quantum Vibe has ubiquitous tank-based autodocs.
  • Schlock Mercenary has one that was souped up a bit and actually tries to improve its patients, sometimes successfully. The Toughs dubs it the "magic cryokit" after a few such improvements. Other autodocs in the series, which eventually adopt many of the "magic cryokit"'s concepts, tend to consist of a tank full of nutrient fluid in which nanomachines can fix and reconstruct what they need to. In late installments, they can even rebuild someone from scratch needing only a few mental backups.
  • Tales from the Interface has a machine that can heal or fix any injuries.

    Web Original 
  • SCP Foundation:
    • SCP-212 ("The Improver") is a medical device with three large robotic arms. When anyone gets too close to it, it grabs them and starts performing bizarre surgical procedures on them.
    • SCP-1300 ("Liquid Surgeon") looks like a dentist's chair. When someone sits down in it, it injects a paralytic drug and a local anesthetic and starts performing surgery on them. It removes everything foreign to the body (possibly including something the patient needs, like a pacemaker).
    • SCP-2048 ("The Virtual World") includes a robotic autosurgical suite that can remove a person's brain and replace it with a spongy substance that emulates brain activity as well as a wireless transmitter that allows two-way communication. The suite then replaces the removed section of the cranium and eliminates all evidence of the surgery.

    Web Videos 
  • To The Death features a series of duels at a sword fighting academy that utilizes Laser Swords. After each bout, a machine is used which can almost instantly repair the burns and tissue wounds left by blades, reattach limbs, and resuscitate a fallen fighter.

    Western Animation 
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): Donnie invents a device that can scan someone and provide a health diagnosis in one episode. It erroneously diagnoses Raph as being so sick that he's about to die, leading to him temporarily becoming a daredevil because he thinks he's not going to survive anyway.
  • The Transformers: Ratchet is this trope whenever he appears, as he's the Chief Medical Officer for the Autobots. Later series would give him tools such as EMP generators (a tool that more or less administers anaesthesia to Cybertronians) and scanners that can detect anything wrong with a Cybertronian (or human, if he adjusts his sensors).
  • Tuca & Bertie: Tuca encounters one while undergoing an examination for abdominal pain in "Yeast Week":
    Ultra-Sam: Hi, I'm Ultra-Sam, the ultrasound machine. I've been programmed to comfort you. We tried to teach doctors empathy, but it didn't take.

    Real Life 
  • An actual robotic surgeon already exists. The daVinci Robotic Surgeon is a scary-looking machine, but it is capable of doing real surgery. It still operates via human control, but it has lots of automatic functions, and NASA is interested in creating an A.I.-equipped version for long range space missions, such as a mission to Mars where there wouldn't be a quick option for a return trip home for emergency surgery and it would be inefficient to send several specialists to handle every conceivable surgery.
  • In the early 2000s, Elizabeth Holmes started a company called Theranos, which sold a machine that supposedly could diagnose just about any disease using just a tiny pinprick drop of blood. Holmes was charismatic enough that she got lots of financial backing for this and lots of media buzz, too. Unfortunately, it turned out that the machine didn't work as advertised, and she was convicted of multiple counts of fraud. She was sentenced to just over 11 years in federal prison for this.
  • There exist conspiracy theories about "med beds" that can heal any injury or disease, supposedly being kept from the public by the elite (or by aliens) until a non-specific "Great Awakening." This has had particularly tragic consequences, with some believers going as far as to deny themselves or their loved ones potentially life-saving operations in the vain hope that they will have access to one of these devices.

Alternative Title(s): Automatic Medical Station, Automedic Assistance

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