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| Alexander Burnet; Physician | |
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| Topic Started: 30 Sep 2007, 07:04 AM (287 Views) | |
| Aztec Gold | 30 Sep 2007, 07:04 AM Post #1 |
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Username: Alexander Burnet How did you find out about AG: I just dropped in one day. First Name: Alexander Last Name: Burnet Nickname: Alex Age: 36 Sex: Male Ethnicity: Scottish (lowland) Country of Birth: Scotland Current Whereabouts: Port Royal Occupation: Physician Former Occupation(s): Student and general layabout Parents: Robert and Margaret Burnet Siblings: Charles (44) and Bruce (41) Children: None Avatar: Ralph Fiennes Description: Appearance At 5’11’’, Alexander is no giant, but he’s still a reasonably tall fellow. He has a thin build, with narrow shoulders and long limbs. A well-defined but lean musculature is easily disguised underneath his clothing, except for a very well-turned leg outlined by his fitted knee-length breeches and threadbare white stockings. His hands are long, sensitive, and elegantly tapered, strangely discoloured in places by the pharmaceutical reagents he uses in his profession. Precision and care, and perhaps even a sort of grace, marks his every movement. He has a low, but rich and powerful voice. He has aristocratic, sharp features, perhaps even verging on gaunt; an ascetically pale, pointed face, with a prominent aquiline nose. His mouth is thin, and turns down at the corners; it’s shadowed by deep lines. His eyes are deepset, but a surprising light grey-blue, almost colourless. They’re shaded by a set of finely-traced eyebrows, the same reddish-brown as his curling hair. He dresses as a gentleman, but is short on wardrobe as well as ready cash. Most of what clothing he does own is fraying and battered. If he wants to create a good impression he is obliged to borrow a suit from a friend. His stockings are white silk, but every pair has long, unsightly runners. His shoes are scuffed patent leather with tarnished brass buckles. His shirts are white linen and have all been worn quite thin. He has only a single pair of grey fall-front trousers with a carefully concealed patch-repair in the buttocks region that is nevertheless visible to the highly observent eye. He has two sleeveless waistcoats, one grey and one cream, and three coats; black, grey, and dark blue. He ordinarily wears a battered black felt tricorne, of which the inner lining is completely worn out. Personality Alexander is extremely quarrelsome; he has a talent for very quickly finding whatever point of opinion he and his conversational partner disagree upon. He then proceeds to turn the conversation around into an argument over it. Anything that he believes, he believes very obstinately, and in fact irrationally; it is impossible to change his mind upon any point. This tends to make him very unpleasant company to others, particularly those who do not like to be disagreed with (which generally happens to be most people.) Although he possesses the intelligence and training to be exceptionally courteous and probably even charming, Alex generally makes no attempts in that direction. He is, instead, tactless and abrasive. This is because he enjoys butting heads with people. It’s one of his hobbies. He is especially strong-minded upon the subjects of medicine and politics. His medical beliefs tend to go against the grain of many of his compatriots, particularly William Cullen and Cullenists (for whose theories of neuroses he has the utmost uncordial contempt). Alex is a supporter of Sydenham and the Hippocratic method. In short, he believes only in what he has observed to actually work, and since most medical practices of the time do not work, most of medicine in his opinion is thoroughly useless. He will do what he can in any cases that he can actually help with, and in other cases relies upon the efficacy of placebos. Alex’ idea of a good placebo is one that is as unpleasant as possible. When faced with a truly foul concoction of asafoetida in treacle, or with being injected in the wang with sulfuric acid, a man really knows that he is being physicked and therefore his own imagination will often do a good job in healing. Even though the treatment does nothing in particular to help the ailment, Alex believes it does a man’s mind a world of good. He has formulated a theory of healthful living involving, shockingly, cleanliness, sanitation, and regular exercise. He applies this in his personal life by swimming and diving every day; as a result he is quite athletic, with the ability to hold his breath for amazingly extended periods of time. He applies it to others by prescribing regular walks and cold seawater baths to any of his patients that can manage such activities. The Caribbean climate is in his opinion the very best one possible, as it is warm enough to make bathing in the sea quite safe, without requiring fear of taking a chill. Alex has a thoroughly cynical worldview. Earth is the armpit of the universe, and human beings are the crab lice that live upon the hair there. Attempting to improve upon either is a useless undertaking in his opinion, and so he makes no exertions in that direction. His choice of medicine as a career has no roots in idealism and desire to help his fellow man. Rather, it’s an intellectual challenge that interests him. His patients are by and large nothing more than bodies to him. There is, in fact, not a spark of idealism of any kind anywhere in his mind. He is an atheist because he does not believe that a kind and loving God could possibly allow the world to continue in the shape it is in. Similarly, Alex does not believe in the more tender human emotions. He would profess that there is no romance in his soul whatsoever. That’s not to mean he hasn’t any emotions; he loves his mother, and his friends, and remembers his brothers with a certain fondness. But he’ll never confess to it. Alex is vehemently partisan. Since he was born into a family with strong Tory sentiments, he elected to support the opposing viewpoint according to his nature. He is the Whiggiest of the Whigs, supporting the Hanoverian monarchy – in a limited form, of course; none of the absolute-ruler claptrap for him. He is decidedly sexist, believing in the intellectual and physical inferiority of women. He is contemptuous of their inherent mental capacity, believing the rather silly and flighty temperament common among girls to be their ingrained and natural habit. He has no opinion of the idea of making a woman "accomplished", as languages and science are completely wasted upon her in Alex’ mind. They may be taught art, music, and other worthless things, but knowledge and learning ought to be reserved for men. He ordinarily behaves towards women, especially young women, in a condescending fashion. Alex is fairly intelligent, and has the low cunning of a fox. This, combined with a morbidly cruel sense of humour, makes him a talented practical joker. He will plan and carry out elaborate mechanisms in the pursuit of this hobby. He is peevish and easily offended, with a tendency to fly off the handle at a slight insult. Consequently he has gotten himself into numerous duels, which he generally hopes to resolve by means of pistols. In combat he shoots to kill without any moral quandary about it, and he is an excellent shot; he has killed a number of men. He has no talent with the sword, however, and if obliged to fight with one would be (and has been) at a severe disadvantage. He will never apologise and back down; the word "sorry" is just not in his vocabulary. Alex has a mercurial disposition, tending to act upon the whim of a moment. Such whims of his are quite unpredictable; he may take it into his head to borrow money and ride to town to purchase a new hat in the middle of chatting in the parlour with a friend ten miles away. He has a low attention span and will very quickly get tired of any social activity that is either time-consuming or difficult. Cards bore him immensely, parlour-games send him to sleep, and he despises music and dancing. He is thoroughly self-centered; Alex’ thoughts revolve around what course of action is best for Alex, and other human beings don’t tend to figure into the equation except as variables on the left-hand side. It wouldn’t bother him particularly if some random person was harmed as a result of something he did. All the same he isn’t evil, and does retain a few scraps of humanitarian principle – meaning that he wouldn’t actively try to hurt someone else unless they were trying to hurt him, at which point there are no holds barred. He dislikes and distrusts people as a general rule, and only makes an exception for a small, very select group of friends that can actually put up with him or in rare cases like him. These friends he considers to be quite as important as himself, and he’ll bend over backwards to see that a friend is alright. Of course, he expects them to bend over backwards in return, and feels quite free to ask his friends for loans and favours when he’s in trouble, but he’ll also repay them as soon as he can; he does not like to be in moral or monetary debt. Currently his closest friend is George Walker. Strengths & Weaknesses: Strengths
Alexander Burnet was born to Sir Robert Burnet and his wife Margaret, a Scottish baronet in the lowland county of Roxburghshire. Sir Robert was more or less in charge of the nearby village of Fulton as the village’s magistrate. Neither Sir Robert’s title nor his lands were particularly impressive. Fulton derived its name from an Old English word meaning "filthy and muddy place". This was roughly descriptive of the characteristics of Fulton and the area surrounding it. Its only recommendations were as an excellent shooting-ground for snipe and other waterfowl. This, however, happened to be the recommendation that was most important for Sir Robert, an avid hunter; thus, he was perfectly happy there. Alex had two brothers, Charles and Bruce, both considerably older than him, and from an early age the difference between Alex and his siblings was quite noticeable. Sir Robert’s elder sons were very much after his own mold, and the baronet was surprised at and disappointed in his youngest child. Unlike his brothers, Alex seemed to have no interest in riding, wrestling, fox-hunting, fowling, and other such sportsmanlike activities. Instead, he was a thoughtful and studious sort of person. He isolated himself from other children, including his own brothers. He actually liked his books. This, in Sir Robert’s opinion, was a decidedly unnatural state of things for a growing lad. Consequently Sir Robert took it upon himself to set Alexander straight. Corporal punishment, he figured, was the key to get Alex to be more normal; what could be more logical than using physical pain to encourage physical activity? Unfortunately, all of Sir Robert’s efforts failed, and only served to make young Alex increasingly dissatisfied and Sir Robert increasingly exasperated. His mother Margaret had played only a small role in Alex’s upbringing until this point, but it was then that she did him the biggest favour that anyone in his life had ever done; she persuaded Sir Robert to send him to Aberdeen Grammar School. This was an excellent environment for Alex; although he made few friends there, that was the way that he preferred it. He did not much care for the games and sports organized at the school, but performed the required activities, considering it enough of a price to pay for the tutoring he received. He was an excellent and dedicated student. He spent seven years there before being obliged to leave, having completed the program of education they offered. Alex returned home, to find it wholly as confining and dull as he remembered it. He spent just a few short months moping around there before his mother once again interceded on his behalf and had Sir Robert send him to Oxford for an English education. It was here that Alex determined upon a career; he’d thought, for a long time, that he would choose law, but found himself instead increasingly fascinated by medicine. The works of William Harvey, René Descartes, and other visionaries of the previous century caught Alex’ attention and drew him in. This field, he thought, offered a possibility for true discovery, whereas law only offered a rehash of what had gone before. He began to work with a physician in the area, acting as the man’s assistant after his studies were through for the day. Alex found no difficulty in dealing with the intimate details of the human body; there was not a trace of squeamishness in the young man. Outside of his studies, he was remarkably conservative. The environment in Oxford did anything but encourage studious application, but Alex avoided falling into poor habits. He drank very little, and never whored; he was far too conscious of the risk of receiving a venereal disease for that. He did try women as a sort of experiment, selecting a young woman from his own class level, but they cordially disliked one another, and although she allowed him into her bed there was no question of marriage in the arrangement. She was, in fact, engaged to another man. He found little in the experiment worth repeating, although he has taken a mistress on occasion since then. Alex formed friendships, sometimes in unlikely places. One of his closest was Sebastian Everett. The two could not have been more different. Alex was determined, cerebral, and restrained in his behaviour. Sebastian was uncertain of his life’s direction. He wavered between pursuing science and mathematics, he was dissolute, and pleasure-seeking. Yet for some odd reason they clicked, and Alex was closer to Sebastian than any other person at the university. It was only Sebastian that he missed when, having selected his future course, he left Oxford to study at the University of Edinburgh, which had the best medical program in the world outside of mainland Europe. He again acted as a physician’s apprentice while simultaneously taking courses in anatomy, botany, and chemistry, the three cornerstones of medical practice at the time. He was there, studying, when political unrest across Scotland increased, and being naturally a rather aggressive personality, chose a side. Many of his fellow students, Tory sympathisers, disagreed with his vocally Whig position, and he was shunned. This became much more serious when Bonnie Prince Charlie rose up again in the Second Jacobite Rebellion. Many of the students supported the Jacobites, and Alex became a pariah; when the Jacobite forces seized control of Edinburgh, he was physically attacked by other students. He was badly beaten, robbed, and left for dead in the street, and indeed would have died if the physician, Dr Joseph Whitlow, with whom he worked hadn’t taken him into his house and helped him. Alex spent most of the Rebellion recovering from his injuries and a dangerous fever that he had developed. He only emerged from his sickbed after the defeat of the rebels and the subsequent crackdown. He returned to university, but this time his reputation for Whiggery helped him; after a brief month, he had done with his training, and was given a position on the medical faculty. It was a very comfortable situation financially, and it allowed him to research as he had always wished to do. For a time he prospered, but after a while – less than a year actually - despite his political views, he began to quarrel bitterly with his peers. And worse than that, he also quarreled with his superiors. He was not precisely thrown out of the University of Edinburgh, but he was “encouraged” to depart and seek other employment. Said employment was very difficult to obtained; his name had been blackballed by the enemies he’d made, and he couldn’t find a new position. Alex spent some considerable time, and most of his extra money, in the attempt. Eventually, he wound up taking passage on a merchant vessel, the Briar Rose, towards Virginia, intending to try his luck in the New World. He was part of a considerable fleet, and as it so happened, a privateer ship, the Boscawen, commanded by George Walker, was convoying them. The merchant convoy was attacked by French privateers en route. With only Walker’s ship to protect them, one of the convoy was carried by the French, and the Briar Rose was unfortunately holed badly below the waterline and sunk. Alex’s possessions and meager stock of funds were lost; George’s crew hauled him out of the ocean and he found himself on board the Boscawen with nothing to his name but the clothes on his back. Hearing his difficulty, and discovering that Alex was a trained physician, George offered him the position as ship’s surgeon, as his own surgeon had been killed in the action with the French. Alex, having no better options, agreed to try it. After delivering the rest of the convoy safe to Virginia, he sailed with George and the Boscawen again on a cruise. This was an enormously successful enterprise. After the first prize they took, Alex realized that this was an excellent opportunity, far more monetarily rewarding than any practice on land was likely to be, and decided to stay on for a longer time. At the same time, he came to know George better, and the two of them became close. This was another odd relationship for Alex; George was exactly the sort of person that Alex would normally have hated. George was of no especial birth or account, he was not an educated man, and he was far too friendly and outgoing for Alex’s tastes. But for no apparent reason (in fact, in the face of many apparent reasons to the contrary) he liked Alex and was determined to forge a friendship. Alex wound up liking George in spite of himself. They became inseparable mates. Alex stuck with George and the Boscawen through thick and thin; even when their next cruise failed to take any prizes. He stayed with him after George lost the Boscawen, through his voyages with the Royal Family as a privateer commodore, and through the severe financial difficulties that George landed in after his financial backers in London failed, and his flagship, the King George was seized out from under him. He's still sticking with George even now that they're landbound. They have elected to share a room in an inn and the costs of living. They are currently staying above the King’s Head. Since George seems to be rather useless on land, Alex is attempting to find a job. He is well aware that with another ship far out of George’s reach, he will have to find employment very soon or face poverty. It’s either that or matrimony, and the prospect of marriage is an abhorrent thought to him. |
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11:13 AM Mar 11
