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).
The books was created by a group of young people who were in their teens and twenties. They knew each other through the Federation Trading Post, a store and museum in Manhattan in the mid 1970s.
Ron Barlow ran the Trading Post with Doug Drexler, who would later go on to work professionally for 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.
The MRM was created using the primitive publishing tools of the day. The pages were created on a typewriter and the diagrams were hand-drawn. Yet this group of young people were able to compile each medical fact from Star Trek, provide diagrams and even project out details that were not presented in the show's three seasons.
While the MRM may look a bit out-dated by today's standards, it does a great job of touching on just about every medical fact or topic that was presented in Star Trek. It’s another one of those from the 1970s that told you when you first saw it, that “Star Trek Lives.”
