Short story in which a patient undergoes surgeries he cannot remember and is eventually lobotomized; the suspected culprit is a robot surgeon

Question

I am searching for an old sci-fi short story, likely published in an anthology circa the 50s or 60s.

From what I can recall, a doctor is speculating about one of his patients. The patient experiences some surgeries he cannot remember. The surgeries are helpful, as they were fixing the health issues, but distressed the patient due to the lack of memory/consent. At the end, I believe the patient was lobotomized to "fix the distress". The doctor speculated that it was a robotic surgeon, rolling silently through the night. The twist being that the helpful robot tried to improve the patient's health, but ended up doing more harm than good and felt that a lobotomy solved the final problem.

Answer 1

Except for the lobotomy, and exactly who the doctor is (is the one in your description human, speculating about a robotic surgeon?), it has some similarities to "Men Are Different" by Alan Bloch.

It's told in the first person by a robot doctor.

It (the robot doctor) describes meeting a human who complained of the heat. It describes some logical analysis of how humans are similar to android robots.

It says, "I checked his temperature and decided that his thermostat circuits were shot. I had a kit of field spares with me, and he was obviously out of order, so I went to work. I turned him off without any trouble."

The man obviously dies (no lobotomy that I know of); the robot is surprised that he doesn't recover after being repaired, and concludes that men are indeed different.

Kind of a longer shot, but the description was immediately evocative of this story, which was published in the right time frame mentioned. (1954.)