To M. V. Kiseleva, September 1885. Moscow.

A terse, undated note from September 1885 to Maria Vladimirovna Kiseleva, mistress of the Babkino estate near Voskresensk where the Chekhov family spent their summers and a close friend of Chekhov’s throughout the 1880s. Rather than the usual mix of gossip and banter that fills his letters to her, this one is pure medical shop talk: Chekhov, then still an active country doctor as well as a writer, sends Kiseleva a small package of dressings and instructs her, in three clipped paragraphs, how to use them. He explains that vaseline does not spoil and, mixed with carbolic acid or iodoform, makes a better wound dressing than lard; describes how to dust iodoform onto a wound until it yellows, and how a vaseline-iodoform salve can be sent home with a bedridden patient for self-treatment of wounds, ulcers, and skin conditions; and closes with a note on crystalline carbolic acid as a substitute when iodoform is unavailable, ending on a dry, almost scoffing aside – "though who doesn’t know carbolic acid?"

The letter is a small but vivid record of Chekhov’s dual life: he is here not the writer corresponding with a friend but the physician supplying a household, likely for use among the peasants and estate workers at Babkino, with plain instructions for basic antiseptic care.