This is, essentially, a bit of reportage about the workings of a rural hospital. It was published in 1887, when Chekhov had been out in the world working as a doctor for several years.
The tale is told through the eyes of a boy, Pashka, seven years old, unable to read or write, presumably a peasant. He has come to what apparently is a clinic for the poor. Many of the patients are children, and the doctors treat the kids with offhanded cruelty. That said, they do treat them. (Well, some of them. One sad kid with an injured leg is called an idiot for coming on the wrong day and seems to be sent away, possibly to lose his leg thanks to lack of treatment.) The patients eat well, at least by Pashka’s lights: rich cabbage soup with meat; roast meat with potatoes; there is even extra bread brought by a kind nurse.
Pashka, frightened by the death of an old man in the next bed, runs away, but he doesn’t get far. The cruel doctor (the who called another child an idiot) finds Pashka and calls him an idiot, and says he ought to be beaten, but there’s no one to do it… so the story ends as it has progressed, with the cruelty softened by disinterest.
It’s hard to call this story a successful narrative; the plot, such as it is, is sketchy, and the characterization is wispy to nonexistent. As a piece of reportage, at least read at this distance, it also comes up short–there are too many questions unanswered. Where is this place? Who is it for? Where did the doctors come from? Etc. etc. etc.
And yet there is undeniably something strong and memorable about the tale–following the innocent Pashka through a frightening world that we, the modern day readers, understand barely any better than he does.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Another piece of reportage from the world of medicine is “Ward No. 6,” a novella-length work that I found pretty faulty but, similar to this one, full of interesting observations of the medical profession in 1880s Russia.
A Chekhov Circus 