Chapter 7 seven

seven After seeing off his friends, Andrey Yefimitch sat down behind the table and resumed his reading.Not a sound broke the silence of the night.As if time had stopped, I held my breath together with the doctor who was buried in his book.Nothing seemed to exist, except the book and the lamp with the green shade.The doctor's vulgar face gradually became radiant, showing a moved and delighted smile in front of the progress of human wisdom.Ah, why can't man live forever?Why, he thought, are there brain centers and gyri, why are there sight, language, sense of self, genius, when all this is destined to be buried in the soil, to cool down with the crust, and have no meaning, no purpose for millions of years that follow Does the earth follow the earth to revolve around the sun?Since it needs to cool down, and since it needs to rotate with the earth, there is absolutely no need to conceive man and his high-level wisdom that is close to God from nothingness, and then turn man into dust again as if joking.

This is metabolism!But how cowardly it is to console oneself with something like this immortality!All the unconscious processes of transformation that take place in nature are even lower than human stupidity, for in stupidity there is, after all, perception and will, and in those processes there is nothing.Only a coward who feels fear rather than dignity in the face of death can comfort himself by saying that his body will gradually turn into grass, stone, and clam mold... It is a strange theory to think that metabolism is eternal life, just as After a precious violin is smashed and rendered useless, it is as absurd to predict that the violin case will have a bright future.

Whenever the clock struck Andrey Yefimitch would lean back in his armchair, close his eyes, and think for a while.Under the influence of the beautiful thoughts he read in books, he inadvertently turned his eyes to his past and present.The past is an abomination, and it's best not to think about it.And now is the same as before.He knew that in the main hospital building next to his apartment people were suffering from disease and abscesses while his mind spun with the cooling earth around the sun.Someone probably couldn't sleep, was battling bedbugs, got erysipelas, or groaned from being bandaged too tight, or maybe a patient was playing cards and drinking with the nurses.Twelve thousand people were cheated in one accounting year; the whole work of the hospital, as it was twenty years ago, is based on theft, quarrels, slander, favoritism, on poor bluffing; the hospital is still immoral Institutions are extremely harmful to the health of patients.He knew that Nikita often beat the patients behind bars in the sixth ward, and that Mosheika was begging in the city every day.

On the other hand, he clearly knows that medicine has undergone miraculous changes in the past twenty-five years.When he was studying at the university, he had felt that medicine would soon reach the level of alchemy and metaphysics, but now, when he read at night, medicine often touched him and aroused a feeling of surprise in his heart.Indeed, its brilliant achievements were simply unexpected, and what a profound revolution has taken place!Thanks to antiseptics, many operations that the great Pirogov1 thought would not even be possible in the future can now be performed.Even ordinary Zemstvo doctors dare to perform knee arthrectomy.As for laparotomy, there is only one death in a hundred cases.Stone disease is such a trivial matter that nobody even writes about it anymore.Syphilis has been cured.Then there is genetics, hypnotherapy, the discoveries of Pasteur and Koch, hygiene based on statistical power, and our Russian Zemstvo medical system.Compared with the past, psychiatry and its modern psychiatric classification, diagnosis, and treatment are like a majestic Elbrus ⑤.Now they are treated more humanely than madmen, and they are no longer required to wear tight hospital gowns. According to reports, they even hold performances and dances for them.Andrei Yefimitch knew that, judging by the current point of view and fashion, such an ugly phenomenon as the sixth ward could probably only appear in a small town two hundred miles from the railway line, because the mayor and all the members of the council here were They are semi-literate bourgeois, they regard the doctor as a priest, even if he pours molten tin water into the patient's mouth, they can only believe and cannot make any criticism.In other places, the public and the press would have smashed this little Bastille.

① N. I. Pirogov (1810-881), Russian anatomist and surgeon. ②The original text is Latin. ③ Pasteur (1822-1895), the founder of modern French microbiology and immunology. ④ Koch (1843-1910), German microbiologist, one of the founders of modern bacteriology and epidemiology. ⑤ The peak of the Caucasus Mountains in Russia. ⑥The prison in Paris was destroyed by the masses during the French Revolution in 1789. "But so what?" Andrei Yefimitch asked himself, opening his eyes. "What do you get from this? Antiseptics, Koch, Buster, nothing changes the essence of the matter." The morbidity and mortality are the same as usual. There are balls and plays for madmen, but they are still not allowed to move freely. It can be seen that everything is false and futile. In fact, there is no difference between the best Vienna hospital and my hospital. What a difference."

But a feeling of sadness and almost jealousy made him unable to calm down any longer.This might be due to being too sleepy, with his heavy head hanging down on the book, he could only put his hands on his face and thought to himself: "I do harmful things. I cheat people out of their money. I'm dishonest. But I'm insignificant in myself. I'm only a small part of a necessary social evil: all magistrates are harmful, but white-collar It is not my fault to be dishonest, but the fault of the times... If I were born two hundred years later, I would be a different person." The clock struck three, and he went into the bedroom after turning off the lights.But he was not sleepy.