 What is not true about the surgeon's job?
Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls, men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. Food, on the other hand, is a challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list. Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the hundred-and-first chapter of Moby Dick , a book spooled in the amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting exordium of Isaiah 36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water. The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a spacer. Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming, dietetics and sewage engineering. This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of squeamishness. Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife in space.
 He's the person to file grievances with when there are interpersonal issues
 He takes care of the mental health and morale of the crew  He has to know when to offer alcohol as the appropriate remedy for a situation  He is a sounding-board for those who need to complain  He's the person to file grievances with when there are interpersonal issues