ABSTRACT
The author's passion for philosophy goes a long way back: further than my long, at times difficult, love affair with the profession of medicine, which occupied the greater part of his waking consciousness between 1970 and 2006. Philosophy remains for him the most alluring, as well as the most significant, of all cultural activities. The practical life, responsibility at any level, must be hostile to philosophy and philosophical speculation. At the very least, philosophy and a preoccupation with its most radical ideas unfit one for 'the long littleness' of non-psychopathic ordinary life. The collision between medicine and speculative philosophy in 'Ward No. 6' is a brilliant metaphor for the argument within all of us between the impulse to improve things, or more narrowly to better ourselves, and the need to come to terms with our irremediable condition. And this argument was still active in Chekhov when he died at the tragically early age of forty-four, in 1904.
