Mania Sakhalinosa: an episode in the life of Dr. Anton Chekhov.

ALTHOUGH CHEKHov is universally acknowledged as a short story writer and dramatist of genius, the fact that he was a practising doctor for a large part of his life and was deeply committed to the progress of scientific medicine is often forgotten. An attentive reader of the stories, however, must be aware how often patients and their doctors are portrayed therein. At times the conflicting claims of literature and medicine made him frustrated. On the whole, however, they lived in fruitful partnership. To use his own happy metaphor "medicine is my legal wife and literature my mistress. When I get tired of one I go and sleep with the other".' On one occasion, however, Chekhov abandoned all his literary pursuits and devoted himself to a sustained and exacting task in the service of his legal wife. In 1890 when he was a young medical practitioner in Moscow with an already growing reputation as a writer, he announced his intention of making a five-thousand-mile journey across Asiatic Russia to visit and investigate the penal island of Sakhalin. This paper looks at the purposes and achievement of this journey with particular emphasis on those aspects relating to medicine.