Just two years after the publication of the Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph, some friends in Manhattan got the idea to do their own reference book. The result was the Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual (MRM).
Early Beginnings
The book was created by a group of young people who were in their teens and twenties. They knew each other through the Federation Trading Post, one of the first Star-Trek-oriented stores in the country. The Trading Post was located in Manhattan in the mid 1970s.
Ron Barlow ran the Trading Post with Doug Drexler, who would later go on to be an Academy Award winning make up artist for his work on the movie Dick Tracy. After that, Drexler worked professionally for Star Trek shows in the 1990s and early 2000s. Ron’s girlfriend, Eileen Palestine, a nurse, was the driving force behind the MRM. It was her idea to create the book, after seeing the success of Franz Joseph’s Star Fleet Technical Manual.
Creating the Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual
The Medical Reference Manual was created using the primitive publishing tools of the day. The pages were created on a typewriter and the diagrams were hand-drawn by Drexler. Yet this group of young people were able to pull each medical fact from the 79 episodes of Star Trek, create diagrams and even project out details that were not presented in the show’s three seasons.
Legacy
While the Medical Reference Manual may look a bit out-dated by today’s standards, it does a great job of touching on nearly every medical fact or topic that was presented in Star Trek. It’s another one of those artifacts from the 1970s that informed fans that the cancelled show was something more, and that “Star Trek Lives.”
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