Beverly Crusher's History
Beverly C. Crusher, MD was a female Human who notably served as the chief medical officer of the USS Enterprise-D and the USS Enterprise-E, both under the command of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, in the 24th century. She briefly left her post as CMO of the Enterprise-D to become head of Starfleet Medical, only to return shortly after. She was a Fellow of the Academy of Starfleet Surgeons (Sol Chapter).
Crusher was born as Beverly Howard in Copernicus City on Earth's moon on October 13, 2324. Her ancestry was from North America, although her distant ancestors hailed from Scotland. While Beverly was still a young child, both of her parents were killed. She was raised by her grandmother, Felisa Howard, whom Beverly referred to as "Nana", and who belonged to the noble Howard family, themselves related to the English Dukes of Norfolk.
Both Howards were present during the terrible disaster at the Arvada III colony, and it was during this time Felisa learned how to use herbs and roots for medicinal purposes after regular medical supplies had been exhausted. This inspired Beverly to a career in medicine. Beverly and Felisa later moved to the Caldos colony, where Felisa became a healer until her death in 2370.
Beverly's childhood was mostly happy, though she did go through the same difficulties in making friends and relating to other children that most youngsters experience. As a thirteen-year old, rebellious Beverly changed her hair color to brunette, although she recalled years later that she "couldn't change it back fast enough."
In her later teens, Beverly admitted she developed a smart-alack mouth, which often got her into trouble. She brought a date with a young man named Tom Norris to an abrupt end with the question "Is that a beard or is your face dirty?" Beverly later realized that she had really hurt him, and from that point on she was more conscious of others' feelings.
Beverly attended Starfleet Academy from 2342 to 2350. During her training, she earned her Doctor of Medicine. During this time, she became romantically involved with Jack R. Crusher after being introduced by their mutual friend, Walker Keel. It took months for her to realize their attraction. The two were married in 2348 after Jack proposed to her through a gag gift, a book entitled How to Advance Your Career Through Marriage.
Jack later served aboard the USS Stargazer under Picard, and the couple became good friends with the captain. Picard later admitted he had fallen in love with Beverly, but did not ever express his feelings because he felt that doing so would betray his friend. Almost a year later, the Crushers welcomed a son, Wesley Crusher, in 2348.
Jack died on an away mission while serving aboard the Stargazer in 2353, Picard having been forced to choose between saving another team member or his friend. Picard brought Jack's body home to the grieving Beverly and Wesley. He also accompanied her to see Jack's body in the morgue at Starbase 32. Beverly appreciated the gesture despite the fact that Picard felt it would be better for her to remember him alive rather than as a corpse. Beverly never fully recovered from his death.
Dr. Crusher was appointed chief medical officer of the USS Enterprise-D in 2364, and joined the ship at Farpoint Station with Wesley, reporting on board on stardate 41154. Picard initially had reservations about her presence, but she assured him that the past would have no effect on her duties and she had no problem serving under his command.
An energy-based lifeform from the Beta Renner cloud was accidentally trapped aboard the Enterprise later in 2364. It initially inhabited Lieutenant Worf's body, but next moved to Crusher. It controlled her for a brief period of time, attempting to learn how to use the Enterprise navigational systems in order to return home. The being then transferred itself to the ship's computer system, then took control of Captain Picard.
In mid-2364, Captain Picard invited Crusher on a holodeck adventure set in the fictional world of Dixon Hill. They were joined by Data and ship's historian Whalen. Unfortunately, a malfunction in the holodeck systems due to a Jarada scan caused the safeties to become disengaged, trapping the group at the whim of Cyrus Redblock. They were later freed, but not before Redblock shot Whalen and threatened to kill Beverly.
Crusher was offered a position as head of Starfleet Medical in 2365 and left the Enterprise during that year. She was replaced by Dr. Katherine Pulaski. While at Starfleet Medical, she worked with the notorious Lieutenant Commander Calvin Hutchinson. Crusher found it difficult to be away, however, and decided to return to the ship the following year. After his first encounter with Dr. Crusher following her return, Q commented, "Ah, Doctor Crusher. I see Starfleet has shipped you back into exile."
Dr. Quaice retired in 2367 shortly after the death of his wife, and the Enterprise-D picked him up at Starbase 133 to ferry him home. Although he was in good spirits, he was slightly saddened at the prospect of facing the future without many of his friends, a feeling Beverly knew all too well. At the same time, Wesley Crusher was experimenting with a novel warp bubble. Beverly became trapped in this bubble, and her thoughts at the time created a universe where everyone and everything quickly began disappearing. With the assistance of The Traveler, Wesley was able to create a gateway back to the normal universe. Dr. Crusher was able to deduce what was happening in her universe, and escaped through Wesley's gateway just before the bubble collapsed.
Beverly was questioned in connection with the explosion that crippled the Enterprise's warp core in 2367. Her testimony was twisted by Admiral Norah Satie in order to implicate the quarter-Romulan crewman Simon Tarses in the incident, later determined to be an accident.
When the Enterprise entered a temporal causality loop while exploring the Typhon Expanse, Beverly's feelings of déjà vu during a poker game and evidence of temporal phenomena lead to a solution which allowed the ship to break the cycle.
The senior staff of the Enterprise traveled back to the late 19th century in order to stop Devidian lifeforms from feeding on the neural energy of Humans from that era, and prevent the apparent death of Commander Data in that time. Beverly assumed the guise of a nurse and, along with Deanna Troi, experienced quite a bit of discomfort with the corsets of the period. Crusher determined why the Devidians traveled back to that era, and was almost a victim of their energy-draining device.
In 2369, Beverly developed a close friendship when she mentored Amanda Rogers, who was aboard the Enterprise as part of her Starfleet officer's training. It was later discovered that Rogers was the child of two former members of the Q Continuum who had abandoned the Continuum and had established a new life in Kansas as Humans. They were killed when a tornado struck their home. It was later revealed that this was punishment levied by the Continuum. Q appeared on the Enterprise and, in his own way, began to mentor Rogers in the ways of the Continuum. Beverly objected to Q's interference and was silenced briefly by Q when he transformed her into a dog. Rogers, using her new-found powers, restored Beverly to Human form.
That same year, Admiral Alynna Nechayev assigned Crusher, along with Captain Picard and Lieutenant Worf, to a covert mission to seek out and destroy a Cardassian metagenic weapon on Celtris III. Her purpose was to locate and destroy any biological material related to the weapon. The group went through a rigorous training program for the mission, and it was physically straining on Beverly. She used her charms to get a Ferengi, DaiMon Solok, to secure the team passage to Celtris III, and navigated the dangerous caves of Celtris to what was believed to be the launching point for the weapon. It turned out to be a ruse intended to capture Picard, although Worf and Crusher escaped. As a form of psychological torture under Gul Madred, Picard was offered freedom, but was told Beverly had been captured. Madred said that she would be tortured if Picard left, forcing the captain to stay.
Crusher had to deal with various epidemics aboard the Enterprise, including a polywater intoxication in 2364. The affliction was different than that encountered at Psi 2000 by the older USS Enterprise nearly a century prior, and the antigen created by Dr. McCoy was ineffective; Crusher had to develop a new version.
Another disease ravaged the ship later that year, when students returning from a field trip on Quazulu VIII brought along a deadly respiratory virus. Fortunately, Beverly's skills led her to an antidote, averting disaster.
Beverly helped reconstruct Lore after the Enterprise found him abandoned on Omicron Theta, becoming very familiar with Data's workings in the process.
Crusher was the first to observe the parasites which attempted to take control of the Federation in 2364, and determined a way to remove them from the host.
A Romulan scout was found crashed on Galorndon Core in 2366, and Crusher was in charge of treating the sole survivor. Although she improvised as much as she could, there was not much medical knowledge available on Romulans and the survivor later died.
While visiting the Borg cube which invaded Federation space in 2367, Crusher came up with the idea of damaging the Borg ship's power nodes in order to halt their progress towards Earth. She worked with Commander Data to develop a modification to the nanites which could be introduced to the Borg in order to destroy their mechanical systems, but the changes would take several weeks. Crusher later helped Data link with Locutus of Borg, Picard's assimilated alter ego. She realized that the Borg interdependency was a great weakness, and suggested Data use a seemingly benign command to shut the Borg down. After the crisis, Crusher pioneered the surgical techniques used for removing implants from Picard.
When young Willie Potts was poisoned after eating a native plant on Ogus II, Crusher stabilized his condition and kept him healthy enough to live until the ship arrived at a medical facility designed to treat the poisoning. This task was complicated by the fact that the Enterprise had been hijacked by Data after his "father", Noonian Soong, sent out a signal to bring him to Soong's location. Power was needed from the quarantine field in order to restore the ship's systems, and Dr. Crusher needed to determine the precise amount of energy needed to keep Willie safe.
In 2367, Beverly assisted in the delivery of a large spaceborne lifeform whose mother was accidentally killed by the Enterprise.
Later that year, Dr. Crusher developed a method of treating victims of the Tarchanne; unfortunately, the treatment was only effective on individuals who had only recently begun metamorphosis.
Dr. Crusher was the first non-Trill to study their anatomy and transplant a symbiont into a new host.
When non-corporeal criminals imprisoned on Mab-Bu VI took over the bodies of Troi, Data, and Miles O'Brien, Crusher helped design a neutrino field that would force out and then trap the lifeforms. However, the timing was not right and the crew was forced to abandon the use of the device.
Worf was paralyzed after an accident in the cargo bay in 2368. Beverly invited the noted neuroscientist Dr. Toby Russell to the Enterprise to confer on treatments. Crusher wanted to use traditional treatment options, but Russell pushed for a radical new surgical technique using a genetronic replicator. Dr. Crusher turned down the plan, feeling it to be too risky. Russell suggested the replicator to Worf anyway, angering Beverly. She later relieved Russell from duty after she used one of her experimental drugs to treat a disaster victim when a traditional medication would have saved his life. Furthermore, Crusher was frustrated by the fact that Worf wanted to commit suicide rather than live as a paraplegic. She was adamant that neither the surgery or suicide was possible, but after talking to Captain Picard, she realized that the genetronic replicator was Worf's best chance at staying alive. Crusher reluctantly granted permission for the surgery and it was ultimately successful thanks to the redundancies of Klingon anatomy, although Crusher still did not approve of Russell's methods.
When Ambassador Ves Alkar began using Deanna Troi as a receptacle for his psychic "waste" in 2369, Crusher developed a way to break his link on her and restore Troi to normal.
Crusher was the first to study a macroscopic coalescent organism found on Relay Station 47 in 2369. Her entire hand was duplicated by the organism while she was studying it in the Enterprise sickbay.
Also in 2369, Beverly was a major participant in the race to decipher the final research of Dr. Galen. Her contributions, along with those of the Enterprise-D crew and various other interests, led to the discovery of a message from the ancient humanoids, the oldest sentient humanoid species.
Crusher unwittingly caused the first case of Barclay's Protomorphosis Syndrome in 2370. She used a synthetic T-cell to treat Lieutenant Reginald Barclay's case of Urodelan flu, intending for the T-cell to activate a dormant gene and allow him to fight the infection. Another anomaly in Barclay's genes caused the T-cell to mutate, and it began activating other dormant introns. The T-cell became airborne and rapidly spread to the rest of the ship, causing the entire Enterprise crew to "de-evolve" to earlier evolutionary stages.
As a fully-certified bridge officer, Crusher commanded the Enterprise-D on several occasions, most notably in 2370 while nearly the entire crew was searching for Data on a renegade Borg planet. The ship was attacked by a Borg vessel, but her quick thinking allowed the Enterprise to escape and destroy the Borg ship. She also occasionally commanded night watch shifts in order to stay on top of starship operations.
Dr. Crusher's empathy for her patients and her concern for their care above everything else occasionally caused problems, as she openly challenged Captain Picard's unwillingness to intervene on a situation in 2364 where the Brekkians were supplying the Ornarans with an addictive drug. Such an intervention would have been a direct violation of the Prime Directive.
Another instance of Beverly's empathy getting the better of her was when she rescued a native of Mintaka III during an emergency mission to a cultural observation outpost on the Bronze-age world. The Mintakan, Liko, awoke in the Enterprise sickbay and saw Captain Picard, believing him to be a god. After he was returned to his people, his story caused confusion and paranoia until Picard was able to prove that he too, was mortal.
Also in 2366, Beverly was taken captive on the war-torn planet of Rutia IV after tending to citizens wounded during an Ansata attack. Their leader, Kyril Finn, wanted to have her cure the internal damage caused as a result of the terrorists' use of a folded-space transport device. Crusher was shocked that Finn compared himself to George Washington, but also began to wonder whether or not the Federation's involvement with the official Rutian government was appropriate. She also had a great deal of sympathy for a small child who helped her tend to those injured by the transport device, and she was able to gain Finn's confidence as he sketched several pages of drawings modeled after her. Eventually, Beverly realized Finn was extremely irrational and misguided after he kidnapped Captain Picard and attempted to destroy the Enterprise. She was rescued when the Enterprise crew was able to locate the Ansata compound and Finn was killed. The child picked up a weapon and attempted to assassinate Picard and Alexana Devos, a Rutian security official, but Beverly convinced him to stand down.
Crusher made her feelings about the empathic metamorph Kamala and her "duty" quite clear when the Enterprise played host to peace negotiations between Krios and Valt in 2368. She felt Kamala was being forced into what amounted to slavery, and resented the fact that she was confined to quarters aboard the ship.
In 2368, the Enterprise discovered a crashed Borg scout ship in the Argolis Cluster. There was one survivor, Third of Five, later known as Hugh. Although Lieutenant Worf, Commander Riker and several Enterprise crewmembers wanted to kill the drone, it was due to Crusher's insistence that he was brought aboard and nursed back to health. Beverly strongly disagreed with the plan to send Hugh back with a computer virus designed to infect the Borg Collective, being the sole member of the senior staff who refused to recognize the Borg threat, but eventually helped Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge work with Hugh to construct such a weapon. Eventually, Captain Picard decided against using the virus, but the Enterprise crew did not realize at the time that the personality Hugh developed working with Crusher and the rest of the crew would be nearly as damaging.
Beverly attended the Altine Conference in 2369, and learned of the research of a Ferengi scientist named Reyga. He believed he had found the secret to metaphasic shielding, but many other scientists were skeptical of his claims. Crusher organized a small conference aboard the Enterprise and invited several leading scientists in the field of subspace morphology to view a test of the technology on the shuttlecraft Justman. Unfortunately, the test was sabotaged by a Takaran scientist named Jo'Bril, who staged his own death and then murdered Reyga by making it appear he had committed suicide in order to discredit the Ferengi. Jo'Bril had planned to steal the design for his own malicious use. Beverly felt responsible for the two deaths, and was determined to find the cause of the accidents. Crusher broke a number of rules, including performing an autopsy on Reyga against the tenets of the Ferengi death ritual, and was relieved of duty. After some helpful encouragement from Guinan, she eventually discovered Jo'Bril's plan, prevented him from stealing the data, and proved the technology was valid. Aboard the shuttlepod, Beverly was attacked by Jo'Bril and she was forced to kill him in self-defense. Crusher was exonerated and returned to duty shortly following the incident.
The Enterprise observed the destruction of Boraal II's biosphere in 2370. Crusher supported Dr. Nikolai Rozhenko's plan to save a small group of the Boraalans, feeling that the Prime Directive did not apply since the people would be destroyed anyhow. She was saddened when Picard did not take any action, and was confronted with a new dilemma when Rozhenko went over Picard's head and transported the group to the Enterprise holodeck. Along with Commander Data, Crusher had to decide on an appropriate new home for the Boraalans, a decision which weighed heavily on her shoulders. She correctly assumed that any choice made would shape the development of the Boraalan civilization for centuries to come. The Boraalan group was subsequently moved to Vacca VI, which had a climate somewhat less hospitable, but was in a secluded location.
The Enterprise-D was destroyed in 2371 following a crash landing of the saucer section on the planet Veridian III. Although there were no fatalities to the crew, there were many wounded, which kept Crusher quite busy.
She transferred to the newly commissioned USS Enterprise-E the following year. Her command abilities were put to good use during the ship's near assimilation by the Borg during its trip to the year 2063, where she served as temporary executive officer during the crisis. Even though she was not fond of the Emergency Medical Hologram, she successfully used it as a decoy to keep the Borg distracted while the sickbay staff and patients made it to relative safety.
In 2375, Beverly was part of the diplomatic contingent welcoming the Evora as a protectorate into the Federation. She also aided Captain Picard in his struggle to keep the Ba'ku from being relocated by the Son'a, and was the first to realize that both species were of the same ancestry. During the Ba'ku exodus, Deanna noted that her breasts were starting to "firm up" due to the effects of the planet's metaphasic radiation.
Beverly then attended the wedding of Commander Riker and Counselor Troi on Earth and subsequently traveled to Betazed to take part in a traditional Betazoid wedding ceremony. After discovering Data's 'brother', B-4, Beverly and Lt. Commander Data collaborated on an examination of the less-advanced android's systems. Beverly then, after the Enterprise was diverted to Romulus, examined Praetor Shinzon's DNA, informing Picard that he was a clone of himself.
Continuing to serve aboard the Enterprise, Crusher attempted to pursue a romantic relationship with Picard five times. In 2381, when Picard was called back from their shore leave on Casperia Prime early, she affirmed her belief that their relationship was ending once again. That night, she and Picard conceived a son; Crusher intended to tell Picard, but several attempts on Picard's life over the next two months convinced her that Picard would always be surrounded by danger, and she doubted her ability to protect their son from it.
As Picard himself had never voiced a desire for children, Crusher decided to leave the Enterprise and Starfleet to raise her son, whom she named Jack after her deceased husband, alone. She cut off all contact with her friends and comrades, who would knew nothing of her whereabouts for nearly twenty years.
Crusher settled in London and eventually joined the Mariposas organization; when Jack was old enough, she told him about Picard and encouraged him to meet him, but he decided not to.
During the final battle with the Borg, Crusher expertly fired the rebuilt USS Enterprise-D's weapons manually while Worf was on the Borg cube, much to the surprise of her crewmates. Crusher simply stated that "a lot's happened in the last twenty years" when they looked at her in surprise.
Following the destruction of the Borg, Crusher accepted the position as the new Head of Starfleet Medical Branch and was reinstated with the rank of admiral. In this role, Crusher developed a fleet-wide transporter solution to remove the Borg DNA from Starfleet's young officers. Crusher also spearheaded technology that privately scanned for other irregularities, exposing the Changeling infiltrators in Starfleet.
In 2402, Crusher and Picard accompanied Jack, now a Starfleet ensign, to his first assignment on the USS Enterprise-G.
