Physician (Any Race)
With a strong and steady hand, a clear mind, and with a sharpness and fervor that insures you are always up to date about latest methods and theories, you practice the science of medicine, a busy and rapidly changing field.
With perhaps the highest guild fees, the Physician's Guild and University is one that forces hardship and difficulties upon its members. They are a tight knit group, you cannot get in unless you have a standing member vouch for you. Or that is how it was, until forty years ago. With a growing gap in doctors and a high need and demand, Nightvale stepped in and ordered by law that the need for a standing member to vouch be removed. Instead a standardized entrance examination, with variance to account for regional illnesses and diseases that are more commonly an issue, this test instead legally has to fill that function.
The high fees, however, stayed. The shortage has gotten far better in the last five to ten years however, as has the field of medicine. Gone are the days of leeches now, gone are the days of bleeding. Now it is all various herbal and chemical compounds which, while not true medicine often times, generally do help indirectly, when administered correctly. The correctly part is the rub though, as physicians can only work with what they see and what the patient tells them. If the patient lies, it could mean what he gives them could instead exasperate the issue and end up killing them. Surgeons of course are different still, as are morticians, but they all fall under the same guild. Which, to some, seems a strange coincidence just how many patients who die end up having their cause of death, despite the family claiming it was a screw up in the dosing by the physician, listed after autopsy as something 'unknown', perhaps something the patient 'would have known and didn't share', like holes in the lungs, so difficulty breathing. However to make such inquiries publicly can be highly dangerous to one's continuing existence.
Physicians come in all sorts, whether it be the desperate broke student doing back alley surgery on the cheap to pay their guild dues and fees, the established practice, the state army or navy doctors or medical officer, or a private physician for a noble house or ruling family. As to adventure? Perhaps they are on the run from a local crime lord for failing to save their sibling, perhaps they need to seek answers they don't have at home, perhaps they are deployed or sent to deal with an outbreak.
Role: A physician is the typical healer/medic, but does come with other useful skills as well, including a few useful lore skills that can help with investigation, identification and even a little in regards to nobility and the lay of the land in regards to different families and houses. They are useful friends to have.
With perhaps the highest guild fees, the Physician's Guild and University is one that forces hardship and difficulties upon its members. They are a tight knit group, you cannot get in unless you have a standing member vouch for you. Or that is how it was, until forty years ago. With a growing gap in doctors and a high need and demand, Nightvale stepped in and ordered by law that the need for a standing member to vouch be removed. Instead a standardized entrance examination, with variance to account for regional illnesses and diseases that are more commonly an issue, this test instead legally has to fill that function.
The high fees, however, stayed. The shortage has gotten far better in the last five to ten years however, as has the field of medicine. Gone are the days of leeches now, gone are the days of bleeding. Now it is all various herbal and chemical compounds which, while not true medicine often times, generally do help indirectly, when administered correctly. The correctly part is the rub though, as physicians can only work with what they see and what the patient tells them. If the patient lies, it could mean what he gives them could instead exasperate the issue and end up killing them. Surgeons of course are different still, as are morticians, but they all fall under the same guild. Which, to some, seems a strange coincidence just how many patients who die end up having their cause of death, despite the family claiming it was a screw up in the dosing by the physician, listed after autopsy as something 'unknown', perhaps something the patient 'would have known and didn't share', like holes in the lungs, so difficulty breathing. However to make such inquiries publicly can be highly dangerous to one's continuing existence.
Physicians come in all sorts, whether it be the desperate broke student doing back alley surgery on the cheap to pay their guild dues and fees, the established practice, the state army or navy doctors or medical officer, or a private physician for a noble house or ruling family. As to adventure? Perhaps they are on the run from a local crime lord for failing to save their sibling, perhaps they need to seek answers they don't have at home, perhaps they are deployed or sent to deal with an outbreak.
Role: A physician is the typical healer/medic, but does come with other useful skills as well, including a few useful lore skills that can help with investigation, identification and even a little in regards to nobility and the lay of the land in regards to different families and houses. They are useful friends to have.
Career
Qualifications
Naturally one needs a guild license, meaning one must successfully graduate. They are held to a high financial standard when it comes to Guild Membership, along with certain standards of care, and fees. But unlike other guilds, beyond this they have relative autonomy. Of course this is not all the Guild can offer. If you make a medical breakthrough, and your science has been rigorous, and thorough, they can help get your findings published and distributed swiftly, allowing further testing and study from your piers, and if your findings keep checking out, they will published in the next update of medical textbook for University Students, so over the very next year, and distributed to every Guild Hall/University on the continent. They also generally grant financial boons to such visionaries, often quite noteworthy sums of gold.
Career Progression
CAREER CHARACTERISTIC ADVANCEMENT SCHEME
| WS | BS | Str | T | I | Ag | Dex | Int | WP | Fel |
| - | - | - | - | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
CAREER PATH OUTLINES:
TIER 1: Physician's Apprentice: Copper-4
Skills: Bribery, Cool, Drive, Endurance, Gossip, Heal, Perception, Sleight of Hand
Talents: Bookish, Field Dressing, Read/Write, Strike to Stun
Trappings: Bandages, Healing Draught
TIER 2: Physician: Silver-3
Skills: Charm, Haggle, Language (Guilder), Lore (Anatomy), Lore (Medicine), Trade (Barber)
Talents: Coolheaded, Criminal, Etiquette (Guilder), Surgery
Trappings: Book (Medicine), Guild License, Trade Tools (Medicine)
TIER 3: Doktor: Silver-5
Skills: Consume Alcohol, Intimidate, Leadership, Research
Talents: Etiquette (Scholars), Resistance (Disease), Savvy, Strike to Injure
Trappings: Apprentice, Workshop (Medicine)
TIER 4: Court Physician: Gold-1
Skills: Lore (Noble), Perform (Dancing)
Talents: Etiquette (Nobles), Nimble Fingered, Savant (Medicine), Strong-Minded
Trappings: Courtly Attire, Letter of Appointment
Payment & Reimbursement
The Status of this profession scales from Copper-3 to Gold-1 over the four tiers.
Other Benefits
Full medical access to all the Guilds resources, as well as medicinal herbs and substances, tools, along with profession security. The Guild will not respond...kindly...to students without their license practicing back alley surgery, often this results in immediate expulsion. They also do not respond kindly to anyone hawking any sort of miracle cures or other medicines without being in the Alchemist's Guild or their own Guild.
Perception
Purpose
They treat ailments, illnesses, injuries of all kinds really.
Social Status
Generally respected, though to the poor and lower working class, they can oft be seen as cruel and cold individuals, using tragedy and disease to bleed the poor and disheveled dry, or in a lot of cases, leaving them to die as they can't afford the fees. This is the fault of the Guild, not the physicians themselves, and a few brave physicians in larger cities across Valerick ply their craft for the less fortunate as best they can, fronting the expense themselves, claiming the patient paid for it and insuring the Guild gets their cut.
Demographics
You will find men and women of all walks here, though Vrocks and Dwarves are the rarest.
History
Some of the more important changes have come about as simply observational study and ethically questionable science. Bloodletting, leeching, these treatments are all but gone now, as during the last plague, some surgeons who did not believe in the conventional idealogy did a mass experiment with the sick in their city. They prescribed regular washing and a proper diet to half the patients at random, and leechings to the others. The leeching patients died three times more. They kept meticulous records of the nearly five thousand treated. Of the twenty-five hundred patients prescribed basic hygiene, bed rest, cool water wash downs for the fever, and daily scrubbings with warm water and a salt water and ethanol mix slurry the doktors in question called 'sterile scrub' a total of five hundred died, another eight hundred suffered surgical loss of a ruptured lung or kidney, or lost sight in one eye or hearing in one ear from the fever, but they made it. Also their families, washed daily using the scrub, and as such on average only half of any household would get it, despite being quarantined with a sick individual. Another pattern, it was normally the older (45+ for humans) or the very young (6 or less for humans) who would get sick and using the same treatment almost all the kids would pull through, and with very minimal complications.
Comparatively the leeching group, of the twenty five hundred, fifteen hundred died, the other thousand all suffered severe complications and they spread it to their families with alarming frequency, nearly everyone would get it. This study was published to physicians around the continent and has been replicated in similar conditions with similar results, and for different hated and feared illnesses. Plague, Ratte Fever, Shiver-Lungs, and even Bloody Flux. As such, over the last few years the shift has occurred, and leechings have all but been left in the past, though the Guild has yet to disavow them, so some old, stuck in their ways and unwilling to change doktors, senior members, refuse to embrace the new, likely because they don't want to admit the implications of all those years of patients that they had been giving inferior treatment too. So they just ignore it, refusing to acknowledge reality, unable to come to terms with progress, and separate personal responsibility from lack of industry knowledge. Indeed, amongst elderly doktors, those with forty-fifty years experience (or more in some cases, if they are dwarves, elves, halflings, gnomes, or tieflings) suicides are seeing a steady rise. The old guard either fights to ignore progress, or it seems, snaps from the weight of guilt and takes their own lives. Very few seem able to adjust and come to grips with this professionally, unable to create that separation of fault.
Comparatively the leeching group, of the twenty five hundred, fifteen hundred died, the other thousand all suffered severe complications and they spread it to their families with alarming frequency, nearly everyone would get it. This study was published to physicians around the continent and has been replicated in similar conditions with similar results, and for different hated and feared illnesses. Plague, Ratte Fever, Shiver-Lungs, and even Bloody Flux. As such, over the last few years the shift has occurred, and leechings have all but been left in the past, though the Guild has yet to disavow them, so some old, stuck in their ways and unwilling to change doktors, senior members, refuse to embrace the new, likely because they don't want to admit the implications of all those years of patients that they had been giving inferior treatment too. So they just ignore it, refusing to acknowledge reality, unable to come to terms with progress, and separate personal responsibility from lack of industry knowledge. Indeed, amongst elderly doktors, those with forty-fifty years experience (or more in some cases, if they are dwarves, elves, halflings, gnomes, or tieflings) suicides are seeing a steady rise. The old guard either fights to ignore progress, or it seems, snaps from the weight of guilt and takes their own lives. Very few seem able to adjust and come to grips with this professionally, unable to create that separation of fault.
Operations
Tools
Medical Texts
Surgical Tools
Surgical Tools
Materials
Anesthetics
Bandages
Healing Draughts
Other Alchemical Medical compounds, powders, pills, draughts and salves
Sterile Scrub
Bandages
Healing Draughts
Other Alchemical Medical compounds, powders, pills, draughts and salves
Sterile Scrub
Workplace
City Streets
Hospice
Office
Home Calls
A doktor works where the illness is. So death, sickness, the smells and sounds of suffering people are all to common.
Hospice
Office
Home Calls
A doktor works where the illness is. So death, sickness, the smells and sounds of suffering people are all to common.
Provided Services
Treatment of illness, hurts, injuries and disease.
Dangers & Hazards
Sickness, Suffering, Crippling, Death. Suicide as well. Also enraged family members, in a fit of rage and not thinking clearly, is not unheard of. For those that choose military service, well all the dangers of a war zone apply.
Alternative Names
Doktor, Surgeon,
Type
Healthcare
Demand
Moderate to High
Legality
Highly regulated by the Guild for numbers and who can practice. Ethics are.....questionable, but also very very legal. No real oversight on the ethics thing en masse. Which can create.....unique and disturbing problems.
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