Tag: Anton Chekhov
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Why do physicians write so badly?
Peter ArnoldSydney, Australia An old joke is that pharmacists are the only people who can read physicians’ handwriting. This piece is not about handwriting, but about writing style. Compared with great medical authors, like Somerset Maugham, Conan Doyle, Anton Chekhov, John Keats, and Friedrich von Schiller, most physicians are not good writers. (I could have…
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Medicinal leeches in art and literature
Martin DukeMystic, Connecticut, United States For more than two thousand years, the extraordinary blood-sucking abilities of the medicinal leech (Hirudo medicinalis) provided physicians with an unusual if not bizarre alternative to venesection, cupping, and scarification for blood-letting their patients (Figure 1). This therapeutic use of leeches was described in the writings of Hippocrates, Galen, Nicander…
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The education of Doctor Chekhov
Jack Coulehan Stony Brook, New York, USA Chekov as a medical student October 1883. A fifth-year medical student at Moscow State University agonizes over his upcoming exam. “Woe is me!” he writes to his older brother, “I am forced to learn almost everything from the beginning… cadavers to be worked on, clinical studies, making…
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Anton Chekhov and the Sakhalin Penal Colony
Michael BloorUnited Kingdom In the nineteenth century the Czarist Government wanted to create an Arctic Australia by establishing a penal colony on Sakhalin Island, off the eastern coast of Siberia some five thousand miles from European Russia. There convicts who had served out their sentences would be obliged to stay as settlers, albeit in a…