A New Disease and an Old Remedy

1 A New Disease and an Old Remedy (“Novaya bolezn’ i staroe sredstvo”) is one of Chekhov’s shortest and driest jokes, published in 1883 among the flood of comic squibs, captions, and miniature sketches he turned out that year – his most prolific as a jobbing humorist – for the Moscow weeklies. Chekhov was in his third year of medical school at the time, and the piece is a small private amusement of his double life: a case study written in the clipped, impersonal register of a clinical paper, applied to the corporal punishment routinely inflicted on schoolboys.

The joke works entirely through form. The flogging is described as a disease with its own etiology and course – pallor, dilated pupils, vasomotor irritation, fever, sweat – diagnosed with the same deadpan precision a physician would bring to malaria, down to the Latin nomenclature. The absurdity is never announced; it sits in the gap between the clinical vocabulary and what is actually being clinically described. The mock prescription that follows – quinine, taken prophylactically before school, exactly as one would take it against intermittent fever – completes the analogy and delivers the punchline in a single flat sentence.

It is a minor piece, but a telling one: the future doctor’s training and the future writer’s ear for institutional cruelty already sharing a single sentence, years before either the medicine or the irony would deepen into the mature work.