Medicine Is My Lawful Wife" — Anton Chekhov, 1860–1904
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《新英格兰医药杂志》
"One hundred years ago, on July 15, Russia's most famous physician, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, died of tuberculosis at 44 years of age in Badenweiler, Germany. His body was shipped to Moscow by train in a refrigerated car marked "For Oysters." At the Novodevichy cemetery, Maxim Gorky and Fyodor Chaliapin joined a huge crowd of mourners for a farewell to their Antosha.
(Figure)
Chekhov's Grave in the Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow.
Photograph by Robert S. Schwartz, M.D.
Chekhov's remarkable life was devoted to medicine and consumed by literature. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, "Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and besides, neither of them loses anything through my infidelity."
Chekhov began his medical studies at the Moscow University Medical School in 1879. As a student, he wrote hundreds of short stories to support himself and his family. By the time he had graduated, in 1884, he was a well-known writer and a regular contributor to the St. Petersburg daily Novoe vremya. But in 1890, depressed by his brother's death and fed up with Moscow and himself ("seeing my works in print has for some reason given me no pleasure"), Chekhov decided to make an arduous 8000-km bone-jarring journey across Siberia to Sakhalin, a remote penal colony where 10,000 convicts and political prisoners lived in frozen exile. He sought to expose the harsh conditions of the Czar's gulag: "I want to write one hundred to two hundred pages and thereby pay off some of my debts to medicine." In Sakhalin, Chekhov conducted a medical census of the convicts, investigated their living conditions, drew up mortality statistics, and wrote a detailed description of "the extreme limits of man's degradation." His book, The Island of Sakhalin, prompted an official investigation but was rejected as a doctoral dissertation by the dean of Moscow Medical School ("too sociological").
Chekhov started a general medical practice in the village of Melikhova, 80 km south of Moscow, in 1891. Patients came by foot or cart from as far as 50 km away to see the new doctor. They began to line up in front of the clinic at dawn and bartered for their medical care. Chekhov kept meticulous records, dispensed free medicine, and made 576 house calls in less than six months. In July, he was appointed district public health officer to help bring a raging cholera epidemic under control. In less than two months, he saw almost 1000 patients. The onset of winter vanquished the epidemic, but Chekhov was left utterly exhausted.
Chekhov wrote perhaps as many as 400 short stories and six full-length plays. His fame as a playwright rests on The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. More than 70 movies have been based on his plays and stories. The protagonists of his plays are ordinary bourgeoisie, provincial landowners, and petty aristocrats. They converse in ordinary words, beneath which lies the anguish of their ordinary lives. The dramatic center of these plays is not physical action but psychology — dashed hopes, lost opportunities, consolation, and acceptance of the inevitable. His short stories are open-ended, haunting, sometimes shocking, nonjudgmental slices of life. They are as fresh and inventive today as they were a century ago.
Doctors are prominent among Chekhov's characters, and they are not always admirable. In Ivanov, Chekhov's first full-length play, Dr. Lvov fails not only to recognize Ivanov's depression but also to cure Ivanov's wife of tuberculosis. Dorn, a country doctor in The Seagull, is burnt out after 30 years of practice and, like Lvov, is more of a bungler than a healer. In The Three Sisters, Dr. Chebutykin, an alcoholic failure, admits that he has forgotten all he knew about medicine. Michael Astrov, the country doctor in Uncle Vanya, describes his life this way: "On my feet from morning to night with never a moment's peace, and then lying under the bedclothes afraid of being dragged out to a patient. All the time we've known each other I haven't had one day off." Surely, it is Dr. Chekhov we hear in Astrov's voice.
Chekhov's first bout of hemoptysis occurred in 1884, the year he received his medical degree, and his blood spitting recurred two or three times a year. It is unclear why he denied the significance of these attacks despite the death from tuberculosis of his brother Nicholas. His condition — he called it "the flu" — worsened in Sakhalin, but on returning to Moscow, he refused medical care until 1897, when what was obvious to others became self-evident even to him after he had a nasty bout of hemoptysis while dining in a restaurant. He was then more than 6 ft tall and weighed only 137 lb. On the advice of Dr. Alexei Ostroumov, one of his medical school professors, Chekhov left for a rest cure in Yalta, then a center on the Black Sea for patients with tuberculosis. Instead of resting, however, Chekhov vigorously engaged in a fund-raising campaign for a tuberculosis sanitarium. He also wrote three masterpieces: "The Lady with the Dog" (1899), The Three Sisters (1900), and The Cherry Orchard (1903).
In December 1903, Chekhov fled Yalta and, against his doctor's advice, traveled to Moscow. Constantin Stanislavsky, director of the renowned Moscow Art Theater, had decided to stage the premiere of The Cherry Orchard on January 17, 1904, in celebration of Chekhov's 44th birthday and his 25 years as a writer. The evening was a triumph.
Chekhov and his wife Olga, a former star of the Moscow Art Theater, returned to Yalta in mid-February. Six months later, they moved to a spa in Badenweiler. He died there at 3 a.m. on July 15, 1904. Chekhov's last words were, "I haven't had champagne for a long time."(Robert S. Schwartz, M.D.)
(Figure)
Chekhov's Grave in the Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow.
Photograph by Robert S. Schwartz, M.D.
Chekhov's remarkable life was devoted to medicine and consumed by literature. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, "Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and besides, neither of them loses anything through my infidelity."
Chekhov began his medical studies at the Moscow University Medical School in 1879. As a student, he wrote hundreds of short stories to support himself and his family. By the time he had graduated, in 1884, he was a well-known writer and a regular contributor to the St. Petersburg daily Novoe vremya. But in 1890, depressed by his brother's death and fed up with Moscow and himself ("seeing my works in print has for some reason given me no pleasure"), Chekhov decided to make an arduous 8000-km bone-jarring journey across Siberia to Sakhalin, a remote penal colony where 10,000 convicts and political prisoners lived in frozen exile. He sought to expose the harsh conditions of the Czar's gulag: "I want to write one hundred to two hundred pages and thereby pay off some of my debts to medicine." In Sakhalin, Chekhov conducted a medical census of the convicts, investigated their living conditions, drew up mortality statistics, and wrote a detailed description of "the extreme limits of man's degradation." His book, The Island of Sakhalin, prompted an official investigation but was rejected as a doctoral dissertation by the dean of Moscow Medical School ("too sociological").
Chekhov started a general medical practice in the village of Melikhova, 80 km south of Moscow, in 1891. Patients came by foot or cart from as far as 50 km away to see the new doctor. They began to line up in front of the clinic at dawn and bartered for their medical care. Chekhov kept meticulous records, dispensed free medicine, and made 576 house calls in less than six months. In July, he was appointed district public health officer to help bring a raging cholera epidemic under control. In less than two months, he saw almost 1000 patients. The onset of winter vanquished the epidemic, but Chekhov was left utterly exhausted.
Chekhov wrote perhaps as many as 400 short stories and six full-length plays. His fame as a playwright rests on The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. More than 70 movies have been based on his plays and stories. The protagonists of his plays are ordinary bourgeoisie, provincial landowners, and petty aristocrats. They converse in ordinary words, beneath which lies the anguish of their ordinary lives. The dramatic center of these plays is not physical action but psychology — dashed hopes, lost opportunities, consolation, and acceptance of the inevitable. His short stories are open-ended, haunting, sometimes shocking, nonjudgmental slices of life. They are as fresh and inventive today as they were a century ago.
Doctors are prominent among Chekhov's characters, and they are not always admirable. In Ivanov, Chekhov's first full-length play, Dr. Lvov fails not only to recognize Ivanov's depression but also to cure Ivanov's wife of tuberculosis. Dorn, a country doctor in The Seagull, is burnt out after 30 years of practice and, like Lvov, is more of a bungler than a healer. In The Three Sisters, Dr. Chebutykin, an alcoholic failure, admits that he has forgotten all he knew about medicine. Michael Astrov, the country doctor in Uncle Vanya, describes his life this way: "On my feet from morning to night with never a moment's peace, and then lying under the bedclothes afraid of being dragged out to a patient. All the time we've known each other I haven't had one day off." Surely, it is Dr. Chekhov we hear in Astrov's voice.
Chekhov's first bout of hemoptysis occurred in 1884, the year he received his medical degree, and his blood spitting recurred two or three times a year. It is unclear why he denied the significance of these attacks despite the death from tuberculosis of his brother Nicholas. His condition — he called it "the flu" — worsened in Sakhalin, but on returning to Moscow, he refused medical care until 1897, when what was obvious to others became self-evident even to him after he had a nasty bout of hemoptysis while dining in a restaurant. He was then more than 6 ft tall and weighed only 137 lb. On the advice of Dr. Alexei Ostroumov, one of his medical school professors, Chekhov left for a rest cure in Yalta, then a center on the Black Sea for patients with tuberculosis. Instead of resting, however, Chekhov vigorously engaged in a fund-raising campaign for a tuberculosis sanitarium. He also wrote three masterpieces: "The Lady with the Dog" (1899), The Three Sisters (1900), and The Cherry Orchard (1903).
In December 1903, Chekhov fled Yalta and, against his doctor's advice, traveled to Moscow. Constantin Stanislavsky, director of the renowned Moscow Art Theater, had decided to stage the premiere of The Cherry Orchard on January 17, 1904, in celebration of Chekhov's 44th birthday and his 25 years as a writer. The evening was a triumph.
Chekhov and his wife Olga, a former star of the Moscow Art Theater, returned to Yalta in mid-February. Six months later, they moved to a spa in Badenweiler. He died there at 3 a.m. on July 15, 1904. Chekhov's last words were, "I haven't had champagne for a long time."(Robert S. Schwartz, M.D.)