This tale was written in 1885, when Chekhov had just graduated from medical college and begun practice. And in this story, Dr. Chekhov takes aim at medical quackery: homeopathy.
Told in the present tense, “Malingerers” opens as if it were a bit of reportage. A hard-working homeopath, Marfa Petrovna Petchonkin, is treating patients in her home. She is, apparently, a rich lady, the widow of a general, and her clientele are mainly or entirely the local peasantry. She is, in other words, doing her best to do good, ministering to the poor. However, she does not like the way peasants’ boots smell – they must leave their shoes outside her home. (That’s a nice detail!)
Her devotion to homeopathic cures is, like her generosity, quite deep. When a poor neighbor comes to see her and thank her for curing his rheumatism, he mentions that he lacks money for seed to sow oats and wood to repair his house. The generous Marfa Petrovna agrees to supply seed and wood, and even more besides.
Thanking her obsequiously, the neighbor bows out of her visiting room. But he drops something: Why, it’s the pills she has given him, and which he claims to have taken per her instructions and that supposedly cured his rheumatism. Suddenly, the scales fall from Marfa Petrovna’s eyes as she realizes that her homeopathic ministrations are not what the peasants have been coming to her for. They just need her charity.
I suppose if homeopathy were widespread in the 1880s in Russia, this story could be seen as a kind of call for reform, but as far as I know, homeopathy had been widely discredited and disbelieved by then, in Russia and elsewhere. So it feels like Chekhov is shooting a dead fish in a barrel with this one.
This is one of Chekhov’s clunkiest tales. How much more “Chekhovian” would it be for the peasants to actually believe in the homeopathic cures Marfa Petrovna provides, and for her to continue dispensing them even as a kernel of doubt cracks her previous certainty that homeopathy is far superior to traditional medicine. Instead, we get a rather insipid cartoon.
Bleah.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again: Chekhov had a likably naive admiration for doctors. Unlike homeopathy, medicine was science.
(Not that science had advanced all that far in his day in Russia. Some of the remedies mentioned in his letters are laughable: For instance, he sprays turpentine on his desk and breathes the fumes as a way to allay his cough! And he had tuberculosis!!! And here’s a line from biographer Donald Rayfield: “Chekhov and his professors saw masturbation as a morbid habit for which prostitutes, cold baths and sedatives were the remedy.”)
Doctors often were portrayed with deep admiration, especially in the earlier stories, when medicine was still an ambition for Chekhov, not a daily reality. “Late Blooming Flowers,” a very early attempt at a longer narrative, features an absurdly august medical man. In “The Examining Magistrate,” a doctor’s ice-cold deductive skills solve a mystery. And then there is “The Doctor,” which really must go down as one of the worst Chekhov stories ever–worthy of a soap opera script. The doctor in this story is grave, honest, and caring to a fault.
A Chekhov Circus 