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"I kind of take it for granted that our great-grandchildren will regard us as a sort of precursor species. That they won't think of us as human and if we could see them, we probably wouldn't think of them as human either."
- William Gibson

Powered Suit with Trauma Maintenance  
  A powered suit (or powered armor) that is set up to save as much of your body as possible in worse case scenarios.  

When fighting in space, it is essential to close off damaged parts of a space suit to save the rest of the body.

"The suit is set up to save as much of your body as possible. If you lose part of an arm or a leg, one of sixteen razor-sharp irises closes around your limb with the force of a hydraulic press, snipping it off neatly and sealing the suit before you can die of explosive decompression. Then "trauma maintenance" cauterizes the stump, replaces lost blood,and fills you full of happy juice and No-shock. So you will either die happy or, if your comrades go on to win the battle, eventually be carried back up to the ship's aid station."
Technovelgy from The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman.
Published by Not Known in 1974
Additional resources -

Here's what it was like to "put the suit on:"

I stripped and backed into the clamshelled suit. The new ones were a hell of a lot more complicated, with all the new biometrics and trauma maintenance. But well worth the trouble of hooking up, in case you got blown apart just a little bit. Go home to a comfortable pension with heroic prostheses. They were even talking about the possibility of regeneration, at least for missing arms and legs...

Compare to the repair robots from The Well-Oiled Machine (1950) by H.B. Fyfe, automated apartment maintenance from Ubik (1969) by Philip K. Dick, the service drones from The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979) by James P. Hogan, the Christmas Bush Motile Robot from Rocheworld (1985) by Robert Forward, the maritime robots from Mare Nostrum (2022) by Bruce Sterling and the maintenance drone (holon) from The Mountain in the Sea (2022) by Ray Naylor.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for suggesting this item, and supplying the quote.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Forever War
  More Ideas and Technology by Joe Haldeman
  Tech news articles related to The Forever War
  Tech news articles related to works by Joe Haldeman

Powered Suit with Trauma Maintenance-related news articles:
  - Blackhawk Built-In Tourniquet Pants, Shirts
  - Saving Soldiers With Hibernation
  - Warrior Web: Superman Underwear From DARPA

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Bacteria Turns Plastic Into Pain Relief? That Gives Me An Idea.
Heart Patches Grown In The Lab Repair Hearts

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