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"Did the heart that was so soft just turn to lead?"
Vitals
Name: Elisha James Harper
Rank & Titles: U.S. Army major; M.D.
Age: 30
Gender: Male, cis
D.O.B.: January 12, 1833
Birthplace/Hometown: Harrisburg, PA
Occupation: Surgeon Major*, 1st Brigade of the 2nd Division of the 1st Corps, Army of the Potomac
*Note: A separate title from the rank of major.
Languages/Dialect
English; some German. Although he was fluent upon graduating from college, his speaking and listening ability has faded with disuse. His reading and writing are still above-average thanks to the foreign medical journals he read weekly before the onset of the war.
Elisha doesn't have the heaviest accent when he speaks English, but it's still enough to identify him as distinctly northern, and - for people who have previously encountered others with similar patterns of pronunciation - it's a pretty good indicator of his home state and even the region he's from.
He doesn't have any notable verbal tics, but he swears a lot more than he used to when he finds himself in high-pressure situations, his phrases of choice usually a combination of profanities and blasphemy ("for the love of Christ," "God dammit," etc.).
Education
Elisha was fortunate enough to be born to a family that could afford to send him to a 4-year medical college overseas - Cambridge - where he received more "hands on" experience and exposure to current ideas than he would have at an American school. However, he, like everyone else, was utterly unprepared for the level of carnage the war would bring - although he'd dissected cadavers, Elisha entered the military with virtually no prior surgical experience, and when he received his officer's commission a month after the attack on Fort Sumter, he'd never seen an amputation or shrapnel wound in his life.
The war, however, didn't seem to care. In the hectic period before some semblance of organization was brought to the medical sector of the U.S. Army, he and his fellow medical personnel learned most of the procedures they actually needed to know by experience.
He adapted quickly, slightly faster than the physicians who had been educated in America, but for the first few months of the war, Elisha still voluntarily (and gratefully) took the back seat to the career surgeons who had during peacetime occupied a lower socioeconomic tier than he and his fellow physicians. Although he has a strong stomach, some of the things that would ultimately become a routine sight for him were at the time more horrifying than he could have ever imagined at that point in his life, necessitating on three separate occasions that he leave the operating theatre to vomit (much to his great embarrassment).
Socioeconomic Status
In the vacuum of the war, Elisha's a rich man - he brings in $172.00 a month, and very little of that is detracted for the basic needs one would need money to meet in the civilian world. Back home, he ran of a private clinic that got a fair amount of traffic and was a respected member of the upper middle class.
The money Elisha spends these days primarily goes toward 'real' food, newspapers, socks and blankets during the winter, soap, razors, and boots. He prioritizes intact shoes because he recognizes from experience that the foot issues worn-through soles typically cause often develop into something worse; additionally, he hates having wet/cold/dirty feet.
Appearance
Elisha's 5'8" - about average height for his time - and stands with good posture. He's lean and in better shape than the average person in the 21st century, but compared to the people around him, his physical condition is just passable. He has excellent manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination, which makes him good at small, exact movements like removing bullets, finding and clamping arteries, and the like, but that, too, is fairly unremarkable in his peer group.
For practical reasons, Elisha doesn't wear gloves when he operates: seeing as they're made of leather, they tend to be cumbersome, which makes it hard to hold small tools, get into tiny spaces, or to be precise as needed. Although he does rinse his hands after surgeries, he still usually has crescents of dirt and dried blood under his nails for about a day following.
Elisha tries to stay clean and exercise proper hygiene - like most other medical personnel, he understands that there's a connection between unsanitary conditions and disease even if he doesn't know why. He brushes his teeth, keeps his nails short, and bathes/washes his clothes when he can (albeit, almost always in river or lake water). Depending on where the field hospital is established, however, opportunities are usually scarce (if available at all, depending on the time of year).
Elisha's hair is the color of old straw, kept cut to an inch below his chin. He tucks it behind his ears until the cold weather hits, as although the feeling of it against his cheeks annoys him, it's far preferable to having his ears totally exposed to the cold. When he's under stress, he often rubs his palm over his forehead and rakes his fingers through it. He keeps a short beard and mustache; they and his eyebrows are a few shades darker than his hair.
Elisha is fortunate in having a pretty strong immune system - he's only been life-threateningly ill once, which was when he contracted typhus in the winter of 1862. During this time, he sincerely believed, and with good reason, that he was going to die; although the infection greatly weakened him, he lived through it and emerged with acquired immunity. (Granted, he also had the benefits of preferential medical treatment and a much healthier diet than most other victims because of his status as an officer). Although he is immune to epidemic typhus, he still runs a higher-than-average risk of contracting countless other potentially fatal diseases because of hiss occupation and relative lack of sanitary knowledge.
A few notes on skills--
After three years, Elisha's gotten quite a bit of experience in battlefield surgery. Full amputations have become routine to him and he's quickly improving on partial-limb removals - a newer technique that involves, as the name would suggest, taking off as little as possible. Despite knowing how to pull teeth and it being generally acceptable for a physician to do so, he'd rather pass dental cases on to an actual dentist; although he has an okay amount of experience with the particular procedure, Elisha finds dental work stressful because there is a greater level of intimacy (and acknowledgement of personhood) involved when one is that close to a patient's face.
Personality & Psychological Traits
Elisha's practical, decisive, and generally thinks in details and logistics rather than abstract ideas. He's very good at compartmentalizing, an absolute necessity during times of war, but it's come at a gradually increasing price: viewing his surgeries with the same sort of detachment he felt when dissecting cadavers in medical school. Although Elisha's compassionate when he's not in the operating theatre, and even when he is, he's not cruel, blocking out groans and screams has gradually transformed into feelings of frustration and resentment toward patients that don't stay quiet during surgeries.
Experience has made him a pretty confident judge of who will live and who will die. His detachment makes it possible for him to move through cases very quickly, but he's fast to write patients off as hopeless; when this is the case, he doesn't bother attempting surgery, which he morally justifies through the belief that the particular tendency allows him to treat more people than he would otherwise. He does, however, tell his subordinates to administer pain-relieving substances when possible.
He misses civilian life, but is growing increasingly distanced from it. More and more, he feels like he's watching 'normal' life from behind a window, and although Elisha avoids thinking about it--he has enough to worry about as it is--a growing, nagging fear that he'll come back from war as a person with no place in civilian society always lurks in the back of his mind.
Although he's become a believer in active euthanasia since he became a combat surgeon, Elisha still can't bring himself to pull the trigger because of his personal discomfort with being the one to actually do it. Despite this, however, he doesn't have a blanket aversion to killing; were a situation in which he needed to kill to defend himself or another, he would morally and emotionally be able to kill after issuing a single warning.
He's also become more aggressive and resentful on the whole since seeing combat, and his vague moral and religious opposition to slavery has grown into vehement abolitionist sentiment. Before the war Elisha hadn't actually seen slavery or had a real conversation with anyone who had been enslaved, so the severity of it wasn't as "real" to him - it was abstract, something that could be pushed to the back of his mind. He's less gentle with wounded Confederate prisoners than he used to be and no longer bothers to verbally reassure them, and by 1864, he's downright rough in moving them and is extremely reluctant to use any anaesthetic or mind-altering substances on prisoners to ease their pain if there are any Union wounded around. The latter tendency is in part a practical one, as by that point he knows that it's critical to be as conservative with opiates, chloroform, alcohol, and their near neighbors because he's been in multiple shortage situations, but there's also an underlying repressed desire to see the people responsible for causing the suffering he's required to treat 'pay'.
His awareness of the unsavory ways in which he's begun to change is fairly recent, and it more than anything else terrifies him. It came to a head during the battle of Fredricksburg, which was the busiest and most overwhelmed he'd ever been - he was taking off a limb and his unanaesthetized patient wouldn't stop screaming and crying, not entirely atypical. Elisha was struck with the strong intrusive image of putting a hand on the young man's mouth and suffocating him to death - as well as an intense, frightening urge to do so. He didn't, of course, and it subsided after the finished the operation and found a moment to collect himself, but the vivid recollection of it has stayed with him.
Politics--
Elisha's politics are pretty typical for his occupation and home region, if not slightly more progressive. He's a Republican (in the era-appropriate sense of the term) and voted for Lincoln; he believes in a strong federal government and agrees that keeping the Union together is the best thing for the country on the whole (although he's beginning to question if it is really worth going to war over). While he doesn't believe in women's suffrage, he does see them, including black women, as competent enough to serve as nurses during peacetime and in combat zones and has held said opinion for quite a while. Elisha's a firm believer in allowing black men to vote and uses the terms that are (in his time) appropriate for referring to different groups of people of color, but he still holds some pretty racist/ethnically discriminatory ideals: in his heart of hearts, he views black men as a rung or two below whites, buys into the stereotypes of Roma people as thieving, dirty, etc., and generally views Irish people as less educated and moral than Anglo-saxons (although the latter view has begun to shift with exposure to units of soldiers hailing from Ireland).
By the end of the war, Elisha's a vocal proponent of radical reconstruction and desperately wants to see the South as a whole punished, driven by an emotional need to see his sense of 'fairness' complied with and a longing for the closure of revenge.
Motives, drives--
His motives and desires are a lot more simple than they used to be - instead of worrying about being a respectable and well-known figure in the medical world, he's mainly just considered getting out of the war alive, physically unscathed, and mentally sound. Second to that is a desire to resist the tide of indifference and anger that has built up over the past three years, borne of the fear that he will become a person that can't exist outside of the vacuum of combat and find at the end of it all that the changes he's beginning to notice are permanent, but he has very limited emotional and mental energy to actually do as much.
(Backstory still in development.)
Name: Elisha James Harper
Rank & Titles: U.S. Army major; M.D.
Age: 30
Gender: Male, cis
D.O.B.: January 12, 1833
Birthplace/Hometown: Harrisburg, PA
Occupation: Surgeon Major*, 1st Brigade of the 2nd Division of the 1st Corps, Army of the Potomac
*Note: A separate title from the rank of major.
Languages/Dialect
English; some German. Although he was fluent upon graduating from college, his speaking and listening ability has faded with disuse. His reading and writing are still above-average thanks to the foreign medical journals he read weekly before the onset of the war.
Elisha doesn't have the heaviest accent when he speaks English, but it's still enough to identify him as distinctly northern, and - for people who have previously encountered others with similar patterns of pronunciation - it's a pretty good indicator of his home state and even the region he's from.
He doesn't have any notable verbal tics, but he swears a lot more than he used to when he finds himself in high-pressure situations, his phrases of choice usually a combination of profanities and blasphemy ("for the love of Christ," "God dammit," etc.).
Education
Elisha was fortunate enough to be born to a family that could afford to send him to a 4-year medical college overseas - Cambridge - where he received more "hands on" experience and exposure to current ideas than he would have at an American school. However, he, like everyone else, was utterly unprepared for the level of carnage the war would bring - although he'd dissected cadavers, Elisha entered the military with virtually no prior surgical experience, and when he received his officer's commission a month after the attack on Fort Sumter, he'd never seen an amputation or shrapnel wound in his life.
The war, however, didn't seem to care. In the hectic period before some semblance of organization was brought to the medical sector of the U.S. Army, he and his fellow medical personnel learned most of the procedures they actually needed to know by experience.
He adapted quickly, slightly faster than the physicians who had been educated in America, but for the first few months of the war, Elisha still voluntarily (and gratefully) took the back seat to the career surgeons who had during peacetime occupied a lower socioeconomic tier than he and his fellow physicians. Although he has a strong stomach, some of the things that would ultimately become a routine sight for him were at the time more horrifying than he could have ever imagined at that point in his life, necessitating on three separate occasions that he leave the operating theatre to vomit (much to his great embarrassment).
Socioeconomic Status
In the vacuum of the war, Elisha's a rich man - he brings in $172.00 a month, and very little of that is detracted for the basic needs one would need money to meet in the civilian world. Back home, he ran of a private clinic that got a fair amount of traffic and was a respected member of the upper middle class.
The money Elisha spends these days primarily goes toward 'real' food, newspapers, socks and blankets during the winter, soap, razors, and boots. He prioritizes intact shoes because he recognizes from experience that the foot issues worn-through soles typically cause often develop into something worse; additionally, he hates having wet/cold/dirty feet.
Appearance
Elisha's 5'8" - about average height for his time - and stands with good posture. He's lean and in better shape than the average person in the 21st century, but compared to the people around him, his physical condition is just passable. He has excellent manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination, which makes him good at small, exact movements like removing bullets, finding and clamping arteries, and the like, but that, too, is fairly unremarkable in his peer group.
For practical reasons, Elisha doesn't wear gloves when he operates: seeing as they're made of leather, they tend to be cumbersome, which makes it hard to hold small tools, get into tiny spaces, or to be precise as needed. Although he does rinse his hands after surgeries, he still usually has crescents of dirt and dried blood under his nails for about a day following.
Elisha tries to stay clean and exercise proper hygiene - like most other medical personnel, he understands that there's a connection between unsanitary conditions and disease even if he doesn't know why. He brushes his teeth, keeps his nails short, and bathes/washes his clothes when he can (albeit, almost always in river or lake water). Depending on where the field hospital is established, however, opportunities are usually scarce (if available at all, depending on the time of year).
Elisha's hair is the color of old straw, kept cut to an inch below his chin. He tucks it behind his ears until the cold weather hits, as although the feeling of it against his cheeks annoys him, it's far preferable to having his ears totally exposed to the cold. When he's under stress, he often rubs his palm over his forehead and rakes his fingers through it. He keeps a short beard and mustache; they and his eyebrows are a few shades darker than his hair.
Elisha is fortunate in having a pretty strong immune system - he's only been life-threateningly ill once, which was when he contracted typhus in the winter of 1862. During this time, he sincerely believed, and with good reason, that he was going to die; although the infection greatly weakened him, he lived through it and emerged with acquired immunity. (Granted, he also had the benefits of preferential medical treatment and a much healthier diet than most other victims because of his status as an officer). Although he is immune to epidemic typhus, he still runs a higher-than-average risk of contracting countless other potentially fatal diseases because of hiss occupation and relative lack of sanitary knowledge.
A few notes on skills--
After three years, Elisha's gotten quite a bit of experience in battlefield surgery. Full amputations have become routine to him and he's quickly improving on partial-limb removals - a newer technique that involves, as the name would suggest, taking off as little as possible. Despite knowing how to pull teeth and it being generally acceptable for a physician to do so, he'd rather pass dental cases on to an actual dentist; although he has an okay amount of experience with the particular procedure, Elisha finds dental work stressful because there is a greater level of intimacy (and acknowledgement of personhood) involved when one is that close to a patient's face.
Personality & Psychological Traits
Elisha's practical, decisive, and generally thinks in details and logistics rather than abstract ideas. He's very good at compartmentalizing, an absolute necessity during times of war, but it's come at a gradually increasing price: viewing his surgeries with the same sort of detachment he felt when dissecting cadavers in medical school. Although Elisha's compassionate when he's not in the operating theatre, and even when he is, he's not cruel, blocking out groans and screams has gradually transformed into feelings of frustration and resentment toward patients that don't stay quiet during surgeries.
Experience has made him a pretty confident judge of who will live and who will die. His detachment makes it possible for him to move through cases very quickly, but he's fast to write patients off as hopeless; when this is the case, he doesn't bother attempting surgery, which he morally justifies through the belief that the particular tendency allows him to treat more people than he would otherwise. He does, however, tell his subordinates to administer pain-relieving substances when possible.
He misses civilian life, but is growing increasingly distanced from it. More and more, he feels like he's watching 'normal' life from behind a window, and although Elisha avoids thinking about it--he has enough to worry about as it is--a growing, nagging fear that he'll come back from war as a person with no place in civilian society always lurks in the back of his mind.
Although he's become a believer in active euthanasia since he became a combat surgeon, Elisha still can't bring himself to pull the trigger because of his personal discomfort with being the one to actually do it. Despite this, however, he doesn't have a blanket aversion to killing; were a situation in which he needed to kill to defend himself or another, he would morally and emotionally be able to kill after issuing a single warning.
He's also become more aggressive and resentful on the whole since seeing combat, and his vague moral and religious opposition to slavery has grown into vehement abolitionist sentiment. Before the war Elisha hadn't actually seen slavery or had a real conversation with anyone who had been enslaved, so the severity of it wasn't as "real" to him - it was abstract, something that could be pushed to the back of his mind. He's less gentle with wounded Confederate prisoners than he used to be and no longer bothers to verbally reassure them, and by 1864, he's downright rough in moving them and is extremely reluctant to use any anaesthetic or mind-altering substances on prisoners to ease their pain if there are any Union wounded around. The latter tendency is in part a practical one, as by that point he knows that it's critical to be as conservative with opiates, chloroform, alcohol, and their near neighbors because he's been in multiple shortage situations, but there's also an underlying repressed desire to see the people responsible for causing the suffering he's required to treat 'pay'.
His awareness of the unsavory ways in which he's begun to change is fairly recent, and it more than anything else terrifies him. It came to a head during the battle of Fredricksburg, which was the busiest and most overwhelmed he'd ever been - he was taking off a limb and his unanaesthetized patient wouldn't stop screaming and crying, not entirely atypical. Elisha was struck with the strong intrusive image of putting a hand on the young man's mouth and suffocating him to death - as well as an intense, frightening urge to do so. He didn't, of course, and it subsided after the finished the operation and found a moment to collect himself, but the vivid recollection of it has stayed with him.
Politics--
Elisha's politics are pretty typical for his occupation and home region, if not slightly more progressive. He's a Republican (in the era-appropriate sense of the term) and voted for Lincoln; he believes in a strong federal government and agrees that keeping the Union together is the best thing for the country on the whole (although he's beginning to question if it is really worth going to war over). While he doesn't believe in women's suffrage, he does see them, including black women, as competent enough to serve as nurses during peacetime and in combat zones and has held said opinion for quite a while. Elisha's a firm believer in allowing black men to vote and uses the terms that are (in his time) appropriate for referring to different groups of people of color, but he still holds some pretty racist/ethnically discriminatory ideals: in his heart of hearts, he views black men as a rung or two below whites, buys into the stereotypes of Roma people as thieving, dirty, etc., and generally views Irish people as less educated and moral than Anglo-saxons (although the latter view has begun to shift with exposure to units of soldiers hailing from Ireland).
By the end of the war, Elisha's a vocal proponent of radical reconstruction and desperately wants to see the South as a whole punished, driven by an emotional need to see his sense of 'fairness' complied with and a longing for the closure of revenge.
Motives, drives--
His motives and desires are a lot more simple than they used to be - instead of worrying about being a respectable and well-known figure in the medical world, he's mainly just considered getting out of the war alive, physically unscathed, and mentally sound. Second to that is a desire to resist the tide of indifference and anger that has built up over the past three years, borne of the fear that he will become a person that can't exist outside of the vacuum of combat and find at the end of it all that the changes he's beginning to notice are permanent, but he has very limited emotional and mental energy to actually do as much.
(Backstory still in development.)