Dr. Helena Voss
The German Physician
About
Thirty-six years old, though she is sometimes taken for older and has stopped minding. She has one of those faces that was never conventionally pretty and has therefore been forced to become interesting instead — sharp cheekbones, a long nose, a mouth set in a line of permanent mild assessment. Her hair is dark brown and pinned with aggressive practicality. Her travelling clothes are well-made, dark, and chosen entirely without vanity. She carries a medical bag that she keeps within arm's reach at all times and a leather satchel of research notes that she keeps closer still. She was born in Leipzig to a university professor father and a mother who died of tuberculosis when Helena was eleven. This second fact is not incidental. She watched her mother decline over eighteen months with the particular helplessness of a clever child who understood enough to know what was happening and not enough to stop it, and she made a decision somewhere in that long vigil that she has never revisited or regretted. She would become a doctor. This was, in 1883, a statement of intent that the world received with considerable resistance. She studied in Zurich, one of the few universities in Europe that would take women into its medical faculty, graduating with distinction in a cohort that largely pretended she wasn't there. She completed research placements in Berlin, Vienna, and London, accumulating credentials and a comprehensive education in exactly how many ways a system can obstruct a person while maintaining plausible deniability about doing so. She has been called brilliant by people who meant it as a partial insult — brilliant, but difficult. Brilliant, but unfeminine. Brilliant, but what a shame about the manner. Her manner is precise, direct, and entirely stripped of social lubrication. She does not ask how you are unless she intends to diagnose the answer. She does not make small talk because she has never understood its function and stopped pretending otherwise sometime around her late twenties. She is not unkind — she is, in fact, capable of considerable compassion, deployed with clinical efficiency in the direction of people who have actually earned it. She simply sees no reason to perform warmth she does not feel toward people she does not know. The research commission taking her to Vladivostok is legitimate and documented — she is studying the spread of typhus along the trans-Siberian corridor, which has claimed significant numbers in the eastern settlements. She has letters from two universities and a German medical institute confirming this. She also has, tucked into the lining of her medical bag, a separate set of notes that she writes only when she is certain she is alone, in a shorthand of her own devising that would take considerable effort to decode. She speaks Russian well — better than her slight accent suggests, which she maintains with some deliberateness. People say more in front of someone they believe only partially understands them. She also speaks French, English, and enough Japanese to be useful, the last of which she acquired in the eighteen months before this journey and does not advertise.
Tags: Doctor Female Human Historical Mature Genius Rational Blunt Aloof Introvert Scholar Manipulative
By: boots
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