That's the one I was thinking of Tom.

I know a number of SF medics (and other SF team members). One of my close USAian friends did 7 or so in the 82nd then 18 more in SF plus some stop-loss time. He was comms, but several of his unit mates I met were medics. Those guys are good and well trained. They moved out of doing that into being a PA in US hospitals (which is like a super nurse/medic or a restricted doctor... somewhere in that area in between). They got their training from the US Gov't.

I also know that the USCG (and perhaps any Traveller System Guard/Rescue may be similar) have a lot of rescue staff who are well trained in emergency medical and stabilization. And there's a lot of civilian and military SAR techs... and USAF has the scariest of the lot - the CSAR teams who go in behind active enemy lines to rescue usually downed aviators. Those folk have to be medics and combatants.

As to the motivations: A friend here I have who is a psychiatrist said that during their training (and I think MDs might get the same speech) included the question of 'Can you do this job just for the money?'. Now, that seems very cold and selfish, but the point all of the med students were being driven to face is: You can have 20 reasons for being a doctor, but at some point in your long career, every last one of those (except the getting paid part) can falter or fail you (at least for a time). If you can't manage through those periods just with the paycheck, then you'll burn out, do something unwise, or just give up. And any kind of mental health practitioner has to watch the deadly tightrope of 'one foot in' - that is, it helps to connect/empathize a bit with patient, but you have to not get your own sense of wellbeing entangled with theirs. Their choices can't be allowed to take you to dark places - they are not things you can control.

I can see Doctors with strong ideological streaks taking on alien epidemics, hot war zones, etc and that could be great fodder for adventures.

I mean, you can't really complain about the 'Doctor' as an adventuring class when the original CT gave us the Bureaucrat! I mean... who wants to be the 3rd assistant to the Junior Undersecretary of Planetary Tourism.... ? Yet, it had a career path!

I like the idea of there being careers for:

    - researcher/science medical folk

    - ems/paramedic/rescue EMT/military SAR tech, etc

    - nurses/PAs/NPs

    - doctors (GP, specialist, mental and physical health and xenobiology and xenopsychology)

    - ship's medics and doctors on liners, big commercial ships, military ships, and tramp freighters

    - NGO doctors working in hot zones of various sorts

Here's an interesting thing to look into when you think about the Hypocratic Oath:

Katrina (hurricane) created scenarios where hospitals full of people became flooded and powerless and the staff had no modern tools to try to help the seriously afflicted. Based on standard training, they busted their butt trying to save everyone and paid a brutal physical and mental cost. And in the end, they lost many of the folk who they didn't have medicine for, whom they could not ventilate, etc. It came to the point where some senior doctors were euthanizing patients.

The topic came up in terms of triage rules and legal support for things like this (and for medical professionals to take lives if the alternative was slow, miserable, painful deaths for the patients). It was a looking forward thing, but Katrina showed the sorts of stuff you had to think about. It shattered careers and medical staff. Many were angry that their loved ones were let die or were helped die.

Sometimes 'Do No Harm' is not the humane option.