"What will the future look like?” Good question. If you’re a writer setting a story in the future, you need to picture the stuff of the future. What are the cars like? What are the houses like? What are the weapons like? What does a political map of the Earth look like? You get the idea.
Once you start writing about the future, and imagining what people are doing in that future, if you’re like me you begin to worry about the details, particularly if you’re writing anything set in the relatively near term. I’m pretty sure that if I check some of my own stories written in the ’90s, I’ll be embarrassed at how badly I missed the ubiquity of the cell phone and universality of the Internet. What is even worse is to write a story set in the future, therein to discuss, say, some sort of fantastic new invention, only to discover after publication that said invention exists now and you’d just never heard of it.
Suppose you want to write a story about a new kind of plague that strikes a city or country in the near future. When you describe the nature of the disease, you’d better be sure that its cause and symptoms aren’t too closely mirrored by a disease that’s already known. If your story revolves around some fictional form of treatment for that disease, you need to be certain that treatment doesn’t already exist. If you’re going to have your characters wind up as patients in a hospital, you’ll need to provide some details about what a future hospital will look like, inside and out.
Let’s do the exercise of imagining the hospital of the future. We’re sticking to the near-term, so it’s no fair to posit that surgeries are done by robots or that everyone has access to an “autodoc” or that injuries and illnesses are cured by filtering out the bad stuff in the beam of a matter transmitter. Nor are we going to invoke nanotechnology as a way to cure everything, even though current progress in nanotech is affecting medicine today, just as is affecting everything else.
For this exercise I will make you, the reader, a character in a story. You are going to visit a friend stricken with a mystery ailment, currently undergoing testing in the hospital of the future.
You are driving down the highway. It is near a major Midwestern city, though most of the countryside is fairly rural. You see barns and cows and cornfields. But off to your right is a beautiful squat pyramid of a building, reminiscent of an old Analog cover (January 1974, cover art by Kelly Freas for William E. Cochrane’s “The Horus Errand”).
Soon you spot the sign by the exit ramp to the hospital. It is not a small sign with the word “hospital” on it and a single arrow pointing either left or right. Rather, it is a large sign, on a tall pole, in lights, flashing messages—you can’t miss it, which is the point. The hospital is in a suburban setting; the largest building in what is best described as a “health village.” As you drive down the road to the parking lot, you notice a coffee shop, a pharmacy, a health food store, and a gym.
You park your car in the parking lot and get out. At first you think this parking lot was never quite finished. It is divided into several sections by shallow ditches choked with weeds. But then you look more closely and see that there is a bit too much uniformity about those ditches. They are a design feature of the parking lot. The ditches are actually bio-retentive swales, also called rain gardens. They are there to help filter out contaminants from the rainwater that runs off the lot. The so-called weeds are just plants native to the area that can live without need for care.
You turn your attention to the hospital itself. It doesn’t look a bit like the intimidating institution you oftentimes still see in movies. It looks much more like a fancy corporate headquarters, designed with the intent of setting current and future customers at ease. You note the landscaping; fountains, flowers, shrubs, and swathes of grass crossed by broad sidewalks. You see ponds, and stone garden walls, and you wish you had enough time to do the scene justice while capturing it on camera. The building itself boasts broad expanses of glass across the convex front of the main tower. You wonder what prompted the design, and look forward to walking the halls and exploring the floor plan. You notice classy flourishes of lenticular décor near the entrances, echoing the shape of the tower.
Upon entering the building, nothing says “hospital.” It doesn’t smell like a hospital. It doesn’t look like a hospital. The lobby is wide and deep, with a cascading water display at the far end. Again, the lens-like décor is repeated throughout in the designs of the hanging ceiling panels and entryway desks. Over on the right is a coffee bar with a gift shop beyond that. To the left and to the right, through huge panes of glass, you see atriums filled with pools and grass and paths, with low walls to sit on. These are healing gardens for quiet relaxation and meditation. Of necessity, hospitals are places of plastic and glass and stainless steel and antiseptics. But what your senses tell you is that this hospital is much more than that. This is a place of earth and wind and water and sunshine, the blue and the green and the terra cotta of life.
You continue through the lobby and enter a curved hallway. To your left the wall is all window looking out on the healing garden. You can’t see around the curve in front of you, but you feel as if just a few steps will bring you to where you want to go. You know in your head that this is a big hospital, but the feeling you get is one of coziness. There are no seemingly infinite cold corridors in this place. Everything is in earth tones, and though it doesn’t show, the paint, carpets, glues, and fabrics were all chosen to maintain the cleanest possible interior air quality.
As you draw near the elevators you see the hospital cafeteria. It too is open and airy, with enormous windows looking out on the healing garden from the other end. The tables are populated with people eating and talking and laughing. Some are obviously members of the hospital staff for they share the same color uniforms, some in navy blue, some in beige, some in plum. Others could be either visitors or other staff members, until you notice that all staff members are wearing name badges. You watch as a pair of pretty young women in blue walk to a door. One waves her badge at a sensor and the door unlocks and they go through.
You ride the elevator up to the sixth floor. As you walk down the crescent hallway, you almost feel like you’re on the Starship Enterprise. Ahead of you a doctor steps out of a room—no, the doors didn’t slide apart. But he speaks into a pendant. “Where is Dr. Petkus?” he asks. “Dr. Petkus is in the Pathology laboratory.” “Call Dr. Petkus.” A moment later: “Hello, Tom. What can I do for you?” asks Dr. Petkus. In the hospital of the future, doctors and nurses and other caregivers will be able to communicate with each other instantly and reliably from anywhere in the building.
You pass several rooms on the way to visiting your friend. You notice that all of them are identical in layout and much larger than is traditional. You enter her room. Talking to your friend isn’t a part of this exercise, so we’ll assume she’s sleeping. There is a sofa in the room. You could fall asleep on it yourself since it converts into a bed. Your friend fell asleep with the TV on. It is flat panel LCD HDTV, not the biggest in the world, but a pretty good midsize. There is one in every room, with high speed Internet access thrown in. The program showing is from the hospital’s own video archives. It’s an informational piece about the surgical procedure rooms. It shows you an octopus-like piece of equipment attached to the ceiling, with many arms each holding different pieces of equipment. You are told that each surgical light has a built in camera so the doctors can record and photograph a surgery as it happens. And while a surgery is going on, there is an air curtain surrounding the surgeons, nurses, and patient to keep airborne contamination away.
You wander over to the large windows and look out. Down below you spot the healing gardens, but what is this other garden you see? You didn’t notice that on the way in, but there it is, and it’s easily an acre in size. Then you look closer and realize that the reason you didn’t see the garden before is because it is on the roof. Even more than that, it is the roof, a green roof. Later, after your friend wakes up, you’ll watch a program together on the TV. It will discuss this roof. You’ll learn that the roof has over 100,000 plants growing in four inches of soil. The sedum and allium plants will minimize storm water runoff and help cool the surrounding air. They will also bloom all year around in assorted shades of amber, pink, purple, and burgundy. Even the surrounding green spaces about the health village are irrigated from retained rainwater instead of from the city water supply.
You will learn that at this hospital of the future, the health of the environment is as integral to her mission as is the health of the patients. Cleaning solvents are non-toxic. The dinnerware in the cafeteria is biodegradable, made from corn and sugarcane. Computers and light bulbs, paper and cardboard, batteries and x-ray film, all are recycled.
But for now, you turn from the window and decide to let your friend sleep a bit longer. You remember that coffee bar in the lobby. You step back into the hallway, but hesitate. You were going to go to the elevator, but why not take the stairs? You know this hospital will have windows in the stairwells. And there is so much more you want to see.
So ends the exercise.
My regular readers may wonder why I’ve made my hospital of the future such a “green” place since you know I’m a global warming skeptic and not prone to accepting hysterical environmentalist propaganda. But clean air is to be preferred over dirty air regardless of whether or not you think it is a major problem. And many of the things the global warming crowd would like to see done are worth doing whether or not you think catastrophic climate change is on the way. And regardless of what I think, the current trends are all toward greater use of green technology and design, so we will find buildings of the near term designed with that in mind.
Though the exercise is over, there is one additional detail about the hospital I should add. It is not actually the hospital of the future, but the hospital of the present. I know because I work there. Nothing of my account was fictional (not even the pyramid on the drive there).
Remember that when you set your own story in the hospital of the future.
