In the famous first season episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" an accidental injection of the hyper-stimulant cordrazine causes Dr. McCoy to go on a binge to beat all others. Driven to deep paranoia and rage he escapes the ship to a time planet in orbit below. Chasing after him Kirk and Spock opt to follow their rabid friend through a time portal into Earth's past. This is not the first, or the last, time they tinker when they don't belong.

Caught by eddies in a temporal stream all are brought to the same nexus in New York City at the depths of the Great Depression and dawn of the Second World War. Arriving somewhen after Kirk and Spock, McCoy appears literally from out of a wall, not much worse for wear albeit incoherent as he quickly comes down off his drug-induced frenzy. Spotting a human "rodent" (one with good cranial development!) he confronts the vagrant, and his mood shifts from panic to pain as his surroundings suggest the only medical care available will not rise to his futuristic expectations: "Oh, I'd give a lot to see a hospital. Probably...needles and...sutures. All the pain. They used to hand-cut and sew people like garments. Needles and sutures...all the terrible pain!"

Later in Star Trek IV McCoy takes charge to help a badly injured Chekov in a late 20th century hospital, with his hilarious admonishment to the contemporary staff: "My God man, drilling holes in his head's not the answer. The artery must be repaired. Now put away your butchers' knives and let me save this patient before it's too late!"

The miracle of modern medicine is a cultural misnomer, since it usually occurs invoked by the patient and not the practitioner. Miracles are unrepeatable, unexplainable events, an ignorant malaise of the masses not mirrored in the professional physician. Doctors earn their progress at the cost of untold multitudes. (That in no way excludes alternative methods provided they accept the same standards). Modern medicine can be considered better than a miracle because you can count on it even when it says, "I don't know."

Medical science has come a long way from scaring with beads and rattles, to cutting and sewing like garments, to tomorrow's promise of genetic repair and nanotech tools, because each demonstrable improvement matters to those in service to life. They hint at even more marvelous (in contrast to miraculous) techniques to strive for. That's the trick to treating a patient as more than just a garment.