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[cyberTripping]

It's only natural that a dwarven doctor would see some horrifying things in his time, and seeing the aftermath of a seige would really be quite the wakeup call to a doctoral career.

In order of most discipline to the least, it would most likely go...
Surgeon, Bone Doctor, Suturer, Diagnostician, Wound Dresser.
Just my humble opinion.

I and some others have given their opinion and seem to feel it would be a great idea.

[thvaz]

Good suggestion.

[fricy]

+1

[Kumil]

You mean like STRESS_VULNERABILITY ? http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Personality_trait

[cyberTripping]

Do med positions do that? I'm not sure. The suggestion I'm making is to have it raise the newly-added Discipline skill, so that y'know, your CMD who's been cutting up dwarves since day 1 doesn't run in terror when he sees a patient die.

edit: grammar

[GavJ]

The title is a little ambiguous. "Medical POSITIONS" it says, rather than "medical PRACTICE"

Just to be clear, in CASE it's not what you meant -- you should not get any discipline merely from being assigned to the position. But yes, you should get discipline from actually cutting people up and such.

Surgery should confer a much larger benefit than diagnosing.

Also, it would be nice if you could do training (using cadavers or something) that would both raise skills and discipline without current medical need.

[neblime]

I think the problems this suggestion solved are better overcome by changes to how fear works at present.  of course it makes sense in some situations for creatures to be "overcome by horror" and flee (like when confronted by a vicious rabbit or aardvark) but in other situations maybe a more appropriate description of the effect on the creature is apprehension or dread.  imagine a dwarf is going to perform surgery on another dwarf, he sees the dwarf has particularly horrific injuries (maybe the initial reaction is disgust/revulsion), he (probably) wouldn't run screaming, but rather become nervous or otherwise disturbed, maybe he is less sure of his surgical abilities or other skills in such a state, and of course gains a bad thought.

All that said, it does make a lot of sense for medical expertise to inure dwarves to horrific injuries or the presence of corpses, but if they simply gain discipline it also prevents them from fleeing from a fight in cases where they're simply outnumbered and horrific injuries aren't involved, which doesn't make much sense.

[cyberTripping]

-snip-

Changed title for clarity.

-more snip-

This is a good point. Maybe there could be a seperate trait or such related to how much medical experience a dwarf has?

[Shazbot]

I will note there is a distinct difference between being on a battlefield and seeing the results of a battlefield. The actual mortal fear of one's own death is not something doctors commonly face to any appreciable degree. Furthermore, doctors are presumably not in the business of making their subjects die, so a surgeon's state of mental trauma is very different from a swordsman's.

My hospital has not been terribly busy, but I've not seen doctors crippled by horror which this suggestion somewhat implies is a problem. Perhaps I'm missing something or this isn't the case.

[GavJ]

My hospital has not been terribly busy, but I've not seen doctors crippled by horror which this suggestion somewhat implies is a problem. Perhaps I'm missing something or this isn't the case.

Your doctors are also trained (it's a lot more terrifying to see sick, dead bodies and NOT KNOW if they're dangerous or how or when or what to do, etc.) and have been screened to remove those who do cringe in terror at dead bodies by forcing them to go through anatomy class at the very least.

[therahedwig]

... gavj, I think he meant his dwarf fortress hospital.

But yes, puking during anatomy class is apparantly a time honored tradition amongst med-students, which results in them being a lot more hardened when they actually start treating people. Then there's also people, who while having empathy and capable of feeling terror, don't feel anything beyond mild curiosity when confronted with a large wound.

This suggestion makes sense to me...

[GavJ]

Oh *shrug* well either way. Those things should be part of both RL and DF hospitals, which is the point of the thread.

[cyberTripping]

My hospital has not been terribly busy, but I've not seen doctors crippled by horror which this suggestion somewhat implies is a problem. Perhaps I'm missing something or this isn't the case.

Toady said he reworked the fear system a bit, so maybe it's fixed it? Not sure. The best example I've seen of where this is a problem is
-Busy Hospital
-patient dies
-doctor too scared of corpse to treat another patient beside it
-repeat ad infinitum

[PrimusRibbus]

I view this as a workaround for the horribly bugged fear/morale system.  Fix or remove the fear/morale system, and the need for this goes away.

The other problem is that, due to the current hospital system, this would not be an effective way to train discipline. It already takes huge amount of micromanagement in order to keep medical skills from rusting because there just isn't enough going on in your average fortress' hospital.

The only way this would be effective is if something like a dissection table was added that trained medical skills without the need for micromanaging actual injuries.