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Ward No. 6 by
Chekhov
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VII After seeing his friend out Andrey Yefimitch would sit down at
the table and begin reading again. The stillness of the evening,
and afterwards of the night, was not broken by a single sound,
and it seemed as though time were standing still and brooding
with the doctor over the book, and as though there were nothing
in existence but the books and the lamp with the green shade.
The doctor's coarse peasant-like face was gradually lighted up
by a smile of delight and enthusiasm over the progress of the
human intellect. Oh, why is not man immortal? he thought. What
is the good of the brain centres and convolutions, what is the
good of sight, speech, self-consciousness, genius, if it is all
destined to depart into the soil, and in the end to grow cold
together with the earth's crust, and then for millions of years
to fly with the earth round the sun with no meaning and no
object? To do that there was no need at all to draw man with his
lofty, almost godlike intellect out of non-existence, and then,
as though in mockery, to turn him into clay. The transmutation
of substances! But what cowardice to comfort oneself with that
cheap substitute for immortality! The unconscious processes that
take place in nature are lower even than the stupidity of man,
since in stupidity there is, anyway, consciousness and will,
while in those processes there is absolutely nothing. Only the
coward who has more fear of death than dignity can comfort
himself with the fact that his body will in time live again in
the grass, in the stones, in the toad. To find one's immortality
in the transmutation of substances is as strange as to prophesy
a brilliant future for the case after a precious violin has been
broken and become useless.
When the clock struck, Andrey Yefimitch would sink back into his
chair and close his eyes to think a little. And under the
influence of the fine ideas of which he had been reading he
would, unawares, recall his past and his present. The past was
hateful -- better not to think of it. And it was the same in the
present as in the past. He knew that at the very time when his
thoughts were floating together with the cooling earth round the
sun, in the main building beside his abode people were suffering
in sickness and physical impurity: someone perhaps could not
sleep and was making war upon the insects, someone was being
infected by erysipelas, or moaning over too tight a bandage;
perhaps the patients were playing cards with the nurses and
drinking vodka. According to the yearly return, twelve thousand
people had been deceived; the whole hospital rested as it had
done twenty years ago on thieving, filth, scandals, gossip, on
gross quackery, and, as before, it was an immoral institution
extremely injurious to the health of the inhabitants. He knew
that Nikita knocked the patients about behind the barred windows
of Ward No. 6, and that Moiseika went about the town every day
begging alms.
On the other hand, he knew very well that a magical change had
taken place in medicine during the last twenty-five years. When
he was studying at the university he had fancied that medicine
would soon be overtaken by the fate of alchemy and metaphysics;
but now when he was reading at night the science of medicine
touched him and excited his wonder, and even enthusiasm. What
unexpected brilliance, what a revolution! Thanks to the
antiseptic system operations were performed such as the great
Pirogov had considered impossible even in spe. Ordinary Zemstvo
doctors were venturing to perform the resection of the kneecap;
of abdominal operations only one per cent. was fatal; while
stone was considered such a trifle that they did not even write
about it. A radical cure for syphilis had been discovered. And
the theory of heredity, hypnotism, the discoveries of Pasteur
and of Koch, hygiene based on statistics, and the work of
Zemstvo doctors!
Psychiatry with its modern classification of mental diseases,
methods of diagnosis, and treatment, was a perfect Elborus in
comparison with what had been in the past. They no longer poured
cold water on the heads of lunatics nor put strait-waistcoats
upon them; they treated them with humanity, and even, so it was
stated in the papers, got up balls and entertainments for them.
Andrey Yefimitch knew that with modern tastes and views such an
abomination as Ward No. 6 was possible only a hundred and fifty
miles from a railway in a little town where the mayor and all
the town council were half-illiterate tradesmen who looked upon
the doctor as an oracle who must be believed without any
criticism even if he had poured molten lead into their mouths;
in any other place the public and the newspapers would long ago
have torn this little Bastille to pieces.
"But, after all, what of it?" Andrey Yefimitch would ask
himself, opening his eyes. "There is the antiseptic system,
there is Koch, there is Pasteur, but the essential reality is
not altered a bit; ill-health and mortality are still the same.
They get up balls and entertainments for the mad, but still they
don't let them go free; so it's all nonsense and vanity, and
there is no difference in reality between the best Vienna clinic
and my hospital." But depression and a feeling akin to envy
prevented him from feeling indifferent; it must have been owing
to exhaustion. His heavy head sank on to the book, he put his
hands under his face to make it softer, and thought: "I serve in
a pernicious institution and receive a salary from people whom I
am deceiving. I am not honest, but then, I of myself am nothing,
I am only part of an inevitable social evil: all local officials
are pernicious and receive their salary for doing nothing. . . .
And so for my dishonesty it is not I who am to blame, but the
times.... If I had been born two hundred years later I should
have been different. . ."
When it struck three he would put out his lamp and go into his
bedroom; he was not sleepy.
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