Medical Advice

1 Medical Advice (“Vrachebnye sovety”) is a miniature comic sketch from 1885, one of the many brief parodic “advice” pieces Chekhov tossed off for the humor press in the mid-1880s while training and practicing as a physician. It takes the form of a short list of quack remedies – for a head cold, for dizziness, for arsenic poisoning, for a stubborn cough – each one a small absurdist joke built on the collision between the solemn, authoritative diction of a real medical handbook and the patent uselessness (or outright danger) of the cure being prescribed.

The humor depends on Chekhov’s own medical training: he knew exactly what a genuine piece of doctor’s advice sounded like, and here he reproduces that register with a straight face while emptying it of any actual content – tying one’s ears to opposite walls to stop dizziness, waiting out a cough by simply refusing to cough. The Okhotny Ryad reference (Moscow’s old meat-and-produce market, then associated with strong, sometimes dubious smells) supplies a bit of local color for the arsenic-poisoning “cure.” The piece belongs to a recognizable minor genre of the period’s humor magazines – mock instructions, mock advertisements, mock scientific notices – and offers little narrative as such; its interest is almost entirely in the deadpan compression of the joke.