Medicine and books

Doctor Chekhov: a Study in Literature & Medicine

If you are looking for a Christmas present for anyone you are really fond of, secretly including yourself, you won't find better than this. The major existing biographies of Chekhov available in English are stuffed with facts, but none takes his work as a doctor seriously—as Chekhov himself most certainly did. Even the short work by V S Pritchett somehow manages to be rather dull. As John Coope shows, however, even judged simply as an exceptionally conscientious "Zemstvo" doctor trying to cope with famine, cholera, and boneheaded administrations, and then, as an already very sick man, interviewing over 10 000 prisoners on the Island of Sakhalin and entering epidemiological data on cards for every one of them, Chekhov was a man to be remembered and learned from.

John Coope has broken new ground by providing the first serious assessment of Chekhov as a doctor, perhaps easier to understand in our times than his own, and by demonstrating the close connections between his three fields of work: as a clinician, as a playwright and story writer, and as a moral philosopher. In a perceptive chapter Coope shows how Chekhov began by revering Tolstoy almost uncritically, then moved far beyond him. Despite his huge talent, Tolstoy remained a dilettante aristocrat, with a deep but humourless compassion for the rural poor and contempt for science. Chekhov was a scientific worker, one of very few who have ever understood the need for a reunification of art and science. As Coope shows, Chekhov's ability to present social material that made audiences think, without telling them what to think, came from his deep understanding of science. He left a legacy of artistic truthfulness still active in Russia today, when in Burned by the Sun the monarchist film director Mikhalkov finds himself compelled to make an old Bolshevik his most positive and attractive character.

Coope is the first to have opened new themes, essentially because of his own clinical experience. The best British general practitioners, among whom John Coope has been an outstanding innovator, have learned to respect the intelligence of all their patients in much the same way as Chekhov; and they recognise this sensitivity as a necessity for effective science, not an alternative to it. With Russian medicine in its present demoralised state, we must hope that Dr Chekhov will soon become accessible in translation.

As far back as I can remember, the Great and Good in medicine have deplored the narrow vision of young graduates, their avidity for technical knowledge and their ignorance of the arts. From time to time, someone tries to remedy this by bolting optional courses on to the curriculum, designed to make doctors into humane, educated people. This usually entails a reading list. Students who read and understand this excellently written, unputdownable biography will understand why courses of this kind are not the answer. Chekhov lived a short, big, useful life of immense talent and complete integrity, uniting theory with practice. That needs imagination and courage. He was a hero for our times.

Rating: ****

Julian Tudor Hart, visiting professor, Department of Primary Health Care, Royal Free Hospital, London 

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?