Linda Stanton

Early Life and Education (2329-2353)

Childhood (2329-2347)

Linda Stanton was born in New York City on Earth in 2329, the daughter of Marcus Stanton (born 2294) and Anne Schmidt (born 2292). Both of her parents had moved from Luna to Earth for their university educations and had decided to settle there permanently, Marcus working for the United Earth Government and Anne for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Marcus’s sister, Sarah Stanton, was a physician in Starfleet and took command of the hospital ship Mercy when her niece was just one year old. While the realities of Starfleet service meant that Aunt Sarah wasn’t home very often, Stanton found her aunt to be fascinating, and from an early age, she considered following in her footsteps and joining Starfleet. This decision was made much more certain when Captain Sarah Stanton died in the line of duty in 2340 while developing a cure to a deadly illness that was ravaging her ship. Though Stanton was just eleven when her aunt died, she knew that she wanted to be as brave and as heroic as she had been.

While Stanton’s parents were indifferent towards Starfleet and even blamed Starfleet for Sarah Stanton’s death, they nurtured their child’s dream by taking her on occasional trips into orbit, to the moon, and once even to Earth Spacedock. In school, Stanton excelled in science and mathematics, though art and literature took far more work to become proficient in. When she sat for the Starfleet Academy Entrance Examination in 2346, she passed on the first attempt. It was revealed to her at that point that Sarah Stanton (who had died childless) had designated her as the recipient of her survivor benefits, which included having first pick of which campus to study at. She chose the San Francisco campus, partly for the prestige but mostly because that’s where her aunt had also studied.

Starfleet Academy (2347-2350)

It was a certainty when Stanton entered Starfleet Academy in 2347 that she wanted to pursue a medical degree. She had both the aptitude scores and a genuine desire to do good in the universe. While she initially struggled with some of the physical training requirements, she continued to excel academically. She first met Jonathan Knox during a chemistry course in her second year at the academy and they struck up a friendship, though fell out of touch once Stanton entered the Medical Academy at the start of her fourth year, after having obtained a dual bachelor’s degree in chemistry and xenobiology.

Starfleet Medical Academy (2350-2353)

Thanks to her pre-medical program, Stanton spent just three years at Starfleet Medical Academy, retaining her rank as a senior cadet during that time period. She found medicine to be as immersive and fascinating as she always knew it would be. The three-year medical course at the Academy was an extremely intense experience, with very little time off between terms. While Stanton considered taking a more research-focused track, she settled on internal medicine as her intended speciality and graduated near to the top of her class in 2353.

Early Starfleet Career (2353-2362)

Residency (2353-2358)

While many Starfleet physicians complete residencies in field settings on larger starships, Stanton elected to take a full five-year residency in internal medicine at Starfleet Medical. As excited as she was to get out into the stars, she had no desire to learn on the job in a setting as potentially volatile and unpredictable as a starship would be. In her third year in residency, she was promoted to lieutenant and had an increasing role in helping her peers learn in the program. This leadership resulted in her being named chief resident for her fifth and final year in the program.

USS Banting (2358-2359)

Now a certified internist, Stanton was posted as chief medical officer aboard the tiny Oberth-class surveyor Banting to become fully qualified as a starship chief medical officer. Going from a hospital serving thousands of patients to a sickbay that could barely fit three beds in it was an enormous adjustment, but Stanton proved herself well able to do more with less and impressed her captain. As a short-range vessel, the 2358-2359 charting mission didn’t leave Federation space, but it gave Stanton her first experiences with away missions and real exploration.

USS Galaxy (2359-2362)

Promoted to lieutenant commander, Stanton accepted what was nominally a step down in the hiearachy to join the brand-new USS Galaxy as one of two assistant chief medical officers in 2359. Posting to that ship or any of her sisters was an enormous honor in and of itself, but Stanton was thrilled to be able to work with the latest and greatest medical equipment in any setting. Stanton joined the ship two years after Jonathan Knox had come aboard as head of stellar sciences. It had been almost nine years since the two had last seen one another, and Stanton quickly realized that shy and quiet Knox had matured into a still-quiet but much more confident young man. Their rekindled friendship quickly sparked a full-blown romantic relationship, and the two decided to marry in 2360 after just over a year of dating. While it seemed fast at the time, their marriage would endure for nearly forty years.

The size of the medical department aboard Galaxy gave Stanton the opportunity to practice in fields that she had not received significant exposure to in her prior training. She received significant surgical experience during her stint on Galaxy, rounding out her resumé as a physician. She took the bridge officer’s examination in 2362, and earned her promotion to commander just a few weeks after her husband did.

Seasoned Physician (2362-2385)

USS Hephaestion, 1st Tour (2362-2373)

While Stanton would have been able to continue her career aboard Galaxy without many barriers to her advancement, her husband had the opportunity to serve as a chief science officer on a smaller and older ship, the Excelsior-class Hephaestion. After weighing their options, Stanton and Knox transferred to the Hephaestion in mid-2362. Though it was a smaller sickbay, Stanton was once again chief medical officer and found the expanded role she played to be a fair trade-off from Galaxy. Indeed, the Hephaestion would end up being their home for the majority of the next 18 years.

Stanton became pregnant with their first child, Rebecca, in 2368, a year before Knox would be promoted to first officer. While they thought about requesting a shore posting, they had enough space on Hephaestion to make it work, and neither of them was willing to give up their careers. In 2370, the destruction of Odyssey at the hands of the Jem’Hadar led to a flurry of shipbuilding and older ships being pulled back into commission, meaning that the Hephaestion‘s captain was promoted to a newer ship, leaving Knox to take the center seat himself. Their second child, Sarah, was born in 2372, during the uneasy peace between the Klingon and Dominion conflicts.

Starbase 72 (2373-2375)

When the Dominion War broke out, Stanton and her husband had a long conversation about how to proceed. With a five-year-old and an infant to take care of, they knew that it would make the most sense to relocate either to Earth or to a starbase. A starship at the best of times was not ideal for raising children, let alone an old heavy cruiser in the middle of a war. Reasoning that there were more doctors than starship captains in the fleet, Stanton decided to accept a transfer to Starbase 72 so that she could care for their children in relative safety while Knox went to war. While on Starbase 72, which was attacked unsuccessfully multiple times, Stanton balanced solo parenting alongside honing her skills to treat traumatic injuries. Located behind Federation lines, Starbase 72 was still close enough to the front to receive regular streams of casualties.

USS Hephaestion, 2nd Tour (2375-2380)

Following the end of the Dominion War, Knox-Stanton and her husband were reunited, and she returned to her former posting aboard the Hephaestion. She continued to develop her humanitarian skills, as the ship was part of the rebuilding effort in and near Cardassian territory. Their third and final child, Cody, was born in 2376, bringing their family to five. Four years later, Starfleet decided to retire the Hephaestion, as she was really starting to show her age thanks to scars from the war.

USS Agincourt (2380-2385)

While leaving Hephaestion was bittersweet, the Agincourt was a much larger Nebula-class exploratory cruiser with plenty of space for their family and significantly improved schooling and recreational facilities. Still as chief medical officer and captain respectively, Knox-Stanton has often described the five years they spent together aboard the Agincourt together as one of the happiest points of her life, as her children were still young and they were all together as a family. Starting in 2383, the Agincourt was assigned to support the Romulan Evacuation Mission and provided significant medical and humanitarian aid to the refugees.

Captaincy (2385-2395)

USS Hippocrates (2385-2389)

During the Romulan mission, Starfleet Medical brought a large number of older medical ships into service and had several others built. While Stanton had never been a first officer, she was offered command of the Olympic-class hospital ship Hippocrates in early 2385 as recognition of her long service. This time, it was decided that the children would remain with Knox aboard the Agincourt while Stanton took the opportunity to advance her career—and finally return to rank parity with her husband after over a decade being outranked.

Commanding the Hippocrates was a challenge for Stanton in a few different ways, but in particular, because of the initial questioning, she found herself subject to by bridge officers who had far more experience in the center seat than she did. She was able to strike a balance of knowing when to assert herself and when to allow her subordinates to shine, but before Hippocrates could make much difference in the evacuation, Mars was destroyed later that year by the synths.

With the evacuation halted by Starfleet, Stanton remained in command of Hippocrates, but found herself assigned to missions within Federation space. The ship handled a number of different crises during her tenure, but she missed her family and just did not find the bridge to be as interesting as sickbay was.

Deep Space 38 (2389-2393)

In 2389, Jonathan Knox was promoted to commodore and took command of Deep Space 38, a station built over Barzan II to stabilize the Barzan Wormhole. Stanton elected to join him there and give up command of the Hippocrates to once again become a chief medical officer. By that point, both of her daughters had already gone off to college, so it was just Stanton, her husband, and her son, Cody. During the four years they spent together on the station, Cody went from eleven to fifteen and they faced the reality that they would soon be empty nesters.

Surgeon General’s Corps (2393-2395)

In 2393, Stanton was promoted to fleet captain and selected as the surgeon general for the Fourth Fleet, which had her travelling around the quadrant to inspect medical facilities on starships and starbases. While she considered her home base to be Deep Space 38, it was another assignment that made it difficult for her to gather her entire family together at one time. Even still, though, she impressed the right people with her coolness under pressure and her extremely keen sense of when to intervene and when to let a situation resolve itself.

Flag Officer (2395-Present)

Starfleet Medical (2395-2399)

For much of their marriage, Stanton had often found herself being the one to either sacrifice her career or her time with her family as she and Knox navigated the “two-body problem” that came with being senior officers in Starfleet. It was Knox (then a rear admiral with an important field command) who insisted that he didn’t want her to have to do that again, so they leapt at the opportunity to return to Earth in 2395 when Stanton was offered a promotion to commodore and assignment as assistant surgeon general, while Knox accepted a comparatively lesser role chairing the admiralty board that oversaw the Odyssey-class heavy explorers.

Starfleet Medical Academy (2399-2401)

After four years as assistant surgeon general, Stanton returned to Starfleet Medical Academy as the provost and dean of the faculty, where she served as the chief academic officer and had oversight over the curriculum, teaching assignments, and other faculty policies. While she found this role rewarding, she would only hold it for a few months before her husband, Vice Admiral Jonthan Knox, was killed at Barzan II in battle with the Breen, having taken a field posting once again.

Stanton was devastated. Even as they were forced to balance two careers, Jonathan Knox had been the most important person in her life and a real life partner. She had been visiting the newly-commissioned Starbase 38 just before the battle to see their son graduate from the Barzan II branch of Starfleet Academy. She was busy treating patients during that time, but she found out later that Knox had purposefully destroyed his own ship in order to stop a Breen dreadnought from destroying Starbase 38, thus saving tens of thousands of lives.

Stanton took a few weeks after her husband’s funeral, but otherwise decided not to take a leave of absence. Even still, when she returned to Earth, her role as provost felt grey and hollow. While she was well respected, she did not feel as though she could really shine there, given the pall that had been cast over the assignment. By 2400, she was 70 and considered retiring, until she got a frantic call from the USS Arcturus requesting emergency authorization to conduct an experimental medical procedure to save the spine of a young Risian man, Lieutenant Zaos Sarcaryn, who had been severely injured in a bombing.

The proposed treatment involved using both a form of genetronic replication and nanotechnology to create a nano-organic “patch” to the spine. Since the only equipment capable of performing that procedure was at Starfleet Medical Academy, the decision came down to her desk. The procedure carried significant risks. The patient would never walk again without it, but it could kill him. It came down to a matter of whether a patient’s wishes (and their potential mental health) could be weighed against their physical health.

As Stanton went to examine Lieutenant Sarcaryn herself, the Arcturus chief medical officer, Captain Alenis Anjar, defied her orders to remain silent and briefed the lieutenant on the procedure. By the time he arrived, he was demanding it and nearly hysterical threatening to appeal to the Federation Council if she said no. She was moved by the sheer anguish the young man was in and scrubbed in with Anjar on the procedure. If they failed, they would fail together.

While the procedure did not harm Sarcaryn, there was only incremental improvement—at least at first. Combined with his own Risian anatomy, the treatment eventually resulted in the full restoration of his motor functions after months of intensive physical and psychological therapy. The procedure was a success—a very energizing success. Stanton continued to research the procedure that year and even asked her faculty to study adding a course on related subjects.

Institute for Experimental Rehabilitative Medicine (2401)

In 2401, Stanton offered the chancellorship of Starfleet Medical Academy which would have come with a promotion to vice admiral. To the shock of all parties, she declined. Instead, she wanted to study experimental rehabilitative medical techniques like the one she had used with Lieutenant Sarcaryn. Starfleet had suffered a lot of injuries over the years, and she knew that the more they could do for the wounded, the better for the sheer soul of the organization. Granted a research team at Avalon Fleet Yards, Stanton began her work in earnest there in early 2401.

Olympia Station

While the work of the Institute for Experimental Rehabilitative Medicine was important, work on this project was halted due to many of the techniques owing their origins to Borg technology a few months after Frontier Day 2401. In addition, Starfleet’s shortage of qualified flag officers led Stanton to accept a role as commanding officer of Olympia Station in late 2401.