"Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and besides, neither of them loses anything through my infidelity."
A quote by Dr. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, born on this day in 1860, in the small town of Taganrog, Ukraine. He described his childhood as not having one. His father was abusive to him, his siblings and his mother and at the age of sixteen, his bankrupt father left him behind to manage the family's failing finances in Taganrog while he, himself, moved to Moscow.
With his father hoping to avoid debtors' prison and his mother emotionally broken, Chekhov put himself through school, by working odd jobs and sending money to his family in Moscow. In 1879, he was accepted to Moscow University's school of medicine.
He made little money as a physician, often treating people for free; a habit that continued well into his success as a author and dramatist. Two years after completing medical school, he began coughing blood, but he hid this from others as he pursued medicine and writing.
In 1904, when faced with the fact that he would soon die from tuberculosis, he and his wife decided to take a vacation, instead. He wrote to his family about what a wonderful time he was having, recovering in Germany.
In 1908, his wife wrote, "Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): Ich sterbe ("I'm dying"). The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: "It's a long time since I drank champagne." He drained it, lay quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child."
There you have it, the Physician and Surgeon's Almanac for January 29th, 2012.
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