District Doctor

Reading notes

• The Twenty-Ninth of June (the tale of a hunter who never hits his mark) §4 district doctor

  A zemsky vrach, a doctor salaried by the local zemstvo (elective district council) to serve the rural population -- the same post Chekhov himself later held; here one of the six quarrelsome huntsmen.

• Ivanov §12 a young zemstvo doctor

  A zemsky vrach (district doctor), salaried by the local zemstvo to serve the rural population -- Dr. Lvov's profession, and the source of his self-image as a plain, honest man of progressive principle among the idle gentry he despises. See the headnote and quotables sidecar for his repeated, mistaken diagnosis of Ivanov as a calculating hypocrite (a "Tartuffe," concept/).

• To N. A. Leikin, 30 July 1886. Babkino. §5 the district doctor

  A zemsky vrach, a physician salaried by the local zemstvo (elective district council) to provide medical care to the rural population -- the same kind of post Chekhov himself briefly held near Voskresensk in the early 1880s, here filled in for a colleague at Zvenigorod.

• To Al. P. Chekhov, July 1884. Zvenigorod. §6 district doctor

  A zemsky vrach, a doctor salaried by the local zemstvo to serve the rural population -- the career path Chekhov jokingly imagines fleeing into, and the one he himself would in fact briefly practice.

• On Official Business §2 the district doctor

  The salaried physician attached to a rural district, required by law to accompany the examining magistrate and certify the medical facts of a suspicious death.

• Darkness §1 district doctor

  The zemsky vrach (district doctor) was a physician salaried by the local zemstvo to serve the rural population -- the profession Chekhov himself practiced. Kirila approaches him first not because he has any legal authority, but because the doctor is the only educated official he has regular access to.