At the Bedside of the Sick Man

1 At the Bedside of the Sick Man (“U posteli bol’nogo” in the original) is a brief 1884 sketch, written in dramatic form – stage directions and dialogue – in the vein of the theater-adjacent playlets Chekhov produced throughout his early Antosha Chekhonte years. It belongs to a small cluster of comic pieces built entirely on medical professionalism turned against the patient it is meant to serve.

Two doctors, Popov and Miller, stand over their patient and conduct an argument that is really about method and standing rather than about the man in the bed: conservative treatment versus a change of regimen, punctuated with the Latin tags of the trade. The sick man himself is reduced to a background presence, groaning, peering anxiously at the window and the next room, worried above all about being overheard by his neighbors and losing face as “a family man, a man in service.” The joke turns on the gap between the doctors’ abstract, self-important debate and the patient’s small, concrete terror of scandal – Chekhov’s economy is at its most compressed here, the whole piece scarcely longer than the argument it stages.