Post by Dorothy J Heydt....Would you accept
a living island? I'm not absolutely well stocked with
those, strictly speaking...
There are living, sentient islands in one of White's Sector
General novels. Wait a minute and I'll find the title (I have
all of them).
....
It's _Major Operation_, fourth in the series. Not only is it
island sentient, it's telekinetic and uses psychically controlled
metal blades to trim its fronds with, attack what it thinks are
enemies, etc. There's another sentient species on the same
planet, living in the sea; like sharks, they must continually
swim (well, roll) to keep from asphyxiating. In spite of which,
the Galactics discover their first astronaut as he makes his
maiden flight.
White shared the prejudices of his time (women can't be
Diagnosticians, because they couldn't bear having the mind-record
of somebody else loaded into their pretty little minds), but he
was great at inventing Really Weird Aliens.
I'm not sure about the dating, but Wikipedia has the first
stories from 1957, and _Star Surgeon_, which explicitly
mentions that Educator Tape recordings aren't compatible
with a (human) female mind, is 1963. (The Tape contains
an alien doctor's whole memory, not just medical knowledge,
is obligatory for senior staff, and one nearly kills
Doctor Peter Conway as, I think, an early adopter.)
Britain was legislating away sex discrimination in the
1970s; before then, it was routine when hiring to specify
that a post, or all posts in a department, were for
men, or for women. So I think that White set up a
space hospital with the same kind of sex division as
the ones where Wikipedia says his wife worked and where
he was treated from time to time, and then had to make
excuses for that. Latterly it's made that the medical
staff at Sector General are all high-performing own-species
doctors and liable to start again in nursing anyway,
some species regularly change sex or mate rarely or
unconsciously, and the sex/Tape issue may be solved in
the end after all. Whether this makes up for Conway
being escorted in 1963 by robot chaperone from the nurse
quarters, I daren't claim. (I made that sound worse
than it was - in a way: a programmed time limit for
goodnight kissing was exceeded, but I don't know if we
were told who programmed it; maybe Conway was up against
the Three Rules of Dua Lipa [2017].)