(no subject)

[fieldhospital]

ELISHA HARPER “The ideal of walking through a space of affliction, social and psychological, and yet remaining oneself, upright and in control--”

► vital information

FULL NAME. Elisha James Harper DOB.12 Jan 1830 GENDER.Male SEXUALITY.Bisexual (prefers women) ETHNICITY.White Anglo-Saxon Protestant

HOMETOWN. Harrisburg, PA OCCUPATION.Surgeon Major (a separate title from the rank of major); runs a brigade field hospital that remains loosely attached to the PA 29th regiment. HEIGHT.5'8"

► overview

Elisha J. Harper is a Union surgeon bearing the rank of Major in the American Civil War with severe burnout, currently directing a field hospital. He's moderately introverted, with a pragmatic and analytical disposition and the tendency to deeply compartmentalize negative emotions; while Elisha isn't necessarily hostile, he doesn't go out of his way to make people feel welcome, and some - namely people from regions with different definitions of what is polite conduct, such as the deep south and the UK - find his directness offputting. He is, however, still more compassionate than most, as one would expect from a doctor. By default I play him during the fall of 1864 just south of Atlanta, by which point he's harboring a lot of thinly repressed anger and resentment toward A) the Confederacy, B) Southern civilians, and C) Democrats on the whole (in the era-appropriate sense of the term). He has stopped perceiving the war he's in as 'brother against brother' and instead sees it as a conflict with an enemy that should be made to pay for what it's done; Elisha is a vocal advocate of unconditional surrender on the part of the Confederacy, to include imprisonment of high-ranking officers, and sees anything less as unjust. He is a fervent abolitionist and an advocate for the humane treatment of animals; Elisha is in some ways progressive for the era in his views on women, as he believes that they should have equal access to education, that they can be as intelligent and skilled as men, etc., and sees abortion as a right, but in other ways, not so much - he's on the fence about women's suffrage and sees sex workers as "lowering themselves". He started the war as an Episcopalian Christian, but has since transitioned into resenting God, then ultimately a shift to atheism. I'm flexible with timeline and am down for playing him in other eras (or as a ghost!) as well - just specify! In any setting in which he is a ghost (or reincarnated/in some kind of afterlife), he died in the October of 1864 after taking multiple pieces of shrapnel from a Confederate artillery misfire to the abdomen and chest. The wounds were not critical enough to kill him immediately, but caused a great deal of pain, and he knew he would ultimately die of sepsis, so he implored a nurse who had joined his staff during the March to the Sea to mercy kill him with a single gunshot to the forehead as a final gesture of friendship - and she did.

► physical

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's fairly unremarkable in his peer group. Elisha doesn't have the heaviest accent when he speaks, 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.). He tries to stay clean and exercise proper hygiene as best he can given the situation he's in. Like most other medical personnel, he understands that there's a connection between unsanitary conditions and disease, even though 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), and his appearance reflects that - his hair is usually limp at the roots from accumulated oil and he doesn't smell great. For practical reasons (as well as a lack of disease transmission knowledge) 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 rinses the blood off of his hands after surgeries, he still usually has crescents of dirt and dried blood under his nails for about a day following. 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; while he doesn't like the feeling of it against his cheeks, that's far preferable to having his ears totally exposed to the cold. He keeps a short beard and mustache year-round; they, like his eyebrows, are a few shades darker than his hair. He is fortunate enough to have a pretty strong immune system and has only been life-threateningly ill once: when he contracted typhus during a widespread outbreak 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.

► personality & politics

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. Elisha 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 he 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. 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'. To the very end, however, Elisha remains compassionate toward animals, and can't bear to see them in pain. His ideas on animal welfare and what constitutes abuse are notably ahead of the curve; some of the very common and normalized practices of his time, such as whipping draft animals and the use of checkrains, are things he finds deeply distressing. He's read Horace Bushnell's seminal "Essay on Animals" enough times since its publication in 1963 to be able to accurately quote it in conversation and wholeheartedly believes in its message. Although the essay will ultimately go on to inspire Anna Sewell's Black Beauty and trigger a sea change in the treatment of animals, Elisha is killed by the shrapnel from a Confederate artillery misfire before he can witness it. He is lowered into his grave at the newly designated Arlington National Cemetery only 12 years before its publication. 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 his feelings in that moment haunts and disturbs him.

► background

Elisha was born to educated middle-class parents as the eldest child and only son of four siblings. His father was a doctor until his passing in 1857; his mother wrote a women's column in the local paper that transformed into a women's political newsletter as the succession movement gained more traction down south. He writes to her and his two unmarried sisters, who still live in the family home, on a weekly basis. Elisha spent a great deal of his adolescence hanging around his father's clinic, assisting in routine procedures and, starting around the age of 17, abortions performed in secret as well. He was privileged enough to attend 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. He learned German during that time to keep up with the latest advances in medicine, most of which were happening on the other side of the English Channel, but his speaking skills have faded with disuse. Despite his education, 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 at all, and when he received his officer's commission a month after the attack on Fort Sumter, he'd never even 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. He has since adapted to what these situations demand of him on a psychological level, but at the cost of intense burnout: Elisha Harper is tired of being a surgeon, he's tired of being an officer, he's tired of having the responsibility of running the "shitshow" of an under-supplied army hospital, he's tired of Grant's command, and he's tired of being at war.

► credit

This profile is a mix of a few different design elements - I wrote the code, but the title/subtitle design is courtesy of transilience and the section header designs are modified from a concept by pastries.