Chekhov liked to joke that he was a doctor by profession and merely did literary work in his spare time. Behind the joke lies an intriguing truth. We remember Chekhov as a towering literary figure, but medicine and humanitarian work occupied much of his life and profoundly shaped the way he encountered human suffering.
Nowhere is this more striking than in his remarkable journey across Siberia to Sakhalin Island. Travelling through an immense and unforgiving landscape to investigate conditions in the penal colony, Chekhov undertook an expedition that he would remember as one of the defining experiences of his life. Written by a neuroscientist and practising clinician, Chekhov’s Sakhalin Journey: Doctor, Humanitarian, Writer (Bloomsbury, 2023) follows Chekhov along this extraordinary route, drawing on his own account to reveal the doctor, humanitarian and observer behind the celebrated author. The result is a richer portrait of Chekhov, one that asks us to see his medicine and literature not as competing lives, but as different expressions of the same searching attention to human experience and the determination to not ‘do nothing’ to improve human lives.
Professor Jonathan Cole (MA, MSc, DM, FRCP, FTPS), is a British consultant clinical neurophysiologist, author, and researcher known for combining neuroscience with first-person patient narratives. He serves as a consultant at the University Hospital in Dorset, a visiting professor at Bournemouth University, and has served as the President of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Inspired by his mentor and friend Oliver Sacks, Cole’s work heavily emphasizes the subjective, lived experience of individuals surviving rare or severe neurological conditions.
Jonathan is one of those rare scientists who combines both the rigor of scientific investigations with literary endeavours and even theatre. I will include both Jonathan’s personal website and his website for his collaborations in theatrical productions.
Dr. Anya Daly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics in the School of Arts and Society, University of Tasmania. Interdisciplinary collaborations are at the core of Anya’s research interests. She investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy.
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