Doctor-writers: Anton Chekhov's medical stories

Abstract

Anton Chekhov, the nineteenth-century Russian writer and a practicing physician who often worked with tuberculosis patients, was a forerunner in medically themed narratives. This chapter focuses on Chekhov's best-known stories, which dramatize the relationship between doctors and patients in varied health care contexts. His stories range from the mindset of a medical student (“Anyuta”) to the complicated career development of an early-career physician (“Ionych”) to the psychology of the aging doctor (“A Boring Story”), from medical outcomes for the lower classes (“Misery,” “Grief”) to the cossetted treatment of the social elite (“A Doctor's Visit”). “Ward No. 6” has become emblematic for its insights on mental illness and the harsh ways in which patients are often misdiagnosed and mistreated. Chekhov's stories display multidimensional qualities and unique narrative points of view, highlight elements of ethics and empathy in medical treatment, and remain remarkably contemporary in how they enact principles of narrative medicine.