Ramsey McQueen was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1833, the natural son of George and Mimsey McQueen.  His older sister, Dorothy, married and lives still in Scotland.  George McQueen was a solicitor who gave up his practice to move his family to America in 1845 when Ramsey was 12; after several unsuccessful attempts to settle down in New York the family moved to Boston in 1848.  While unable to re-establish his law practice in the US, George McQueen did become a clerk of the court for the City of Boston, and made enough money to send his son Ramsey to school in Boston and keep the family in a small but cozy flat.  In 1851 Ramsey entered the newly-established Boston University School of Medicine, an off-shoot of the New England Female Medical College in Boston.  Although he had some initial difficulty, Ramsey graduated with a license to practice medicine in 1854; for the next 4 years he apprenticed himself to a team of Boston physicians where he exchanged his labors for hands-on learning in the form of laboratories, practicums, and specialized classes on the latest theories and procedures in medicine, anatomy, chemistry, surgery, and midwifery.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Dr. Ramsey McQueen was operating his own small practice in Boston; several failed romances led him to volunteer as a medic in 1861, and then he was field promoted to Captain and made a full-fledged U.S. Army medical doctor  for the 22nd Massachusetts Volunteer Rifles in 1862.  He endured the Battle of Gettysburg, in which his unit suffered 60 percent casualties, and was present for virtually all of the major battles in which the Army of the Potomac fought, including the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Battle of Antietam, the Battle of Fredericksburg, the Battle of Chancellorsville, and Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant's Overland Campaign in Virginia (spring of 1864).

By June of 1864, Ramsey McQueen had seen enough; traumatized by the nearly endless casualties and forced to perform the most savage and primitive battlefield surgeries on screaming patients in appalling and unsanitary conditions had lead him to abuse laudanum, opium, alcohol, and anything else he could get his hands on.  He was quietly dismissed from service on June 12, 1864 on a small veteran's pension.

The next few years saw Dr. Ramsey fight against addiction while he attempted to resurrect his medical career, which led to only an inconclusive admixture of successes and failures.  A drunken outburst during a lecture at the City of Boston College of Physicians in May of 1872 led to his ouster as a member of that city's medical fraternity; while he was not disbarred it was made plain to him that he ought to seek another city in which to practice medicine.  In early 1873, he met a lovely young socialite named Clementine, and he fell head over heels for her.  While impressing upon her his position as a surgeon, the force of his character, and the potential he had for a successful and possibly lucrative career, he  set to woo her and win her hand at marriage.  He and Clementine married in 1873.  In many ways, Ramsey saw her as the last legitimate hope he had at starting a new life, and he decided that after they married they must relocate somewhere out west, where his reputation as a drunk/addict would not undermine his efforts to start anew.  His marriage has similarly endured a series of ups and downs due to constant war with addiction.

After short stays in Baltimore, Lexington (KY), and St. Louis, Dr. Ramsey and Clementine finally arrived in 1875 at the dusty boarder town of Escondido, where they hope to start a permanent new life.

Doc Ramsey is 6'4" tall, 212 lbs, dark brown hair, beard, and mustache, all just starting to speckle with grey.  He is developing a widow's peak, wears his sideburns three inches below his ears, and his eyes are hazel.