As Though They Had Been Flooded With Light

When Mikhail Bulgakov died in 1940, at the same age and of the same kidney ailment as his father, his works effectively died with him. The Great Soviet Experiment did not encourage wide release of his plays and novels; indeed, it was only in 1966, a generation after its near completion, that his most-loved, most-famous story, The Master and Margarita, introduced herself (books are feminine, aren't they?) to Western readers. Whisper the name of this novel to any quiet crowd and it's London to a Brick that a small but important minority of the group will, if not swoon, remind themselves that they must read it again. Complex, mystical and funny, and allegorical, this is his greatest work.
He gave us other manuscripts. Some deserve a crash-course in Russian history before enjoying. Others are better experienced on stage than read. But Bulgakov, like Chekhov, was also a doctor, well, a short-lived doctor, enjoying medical practice for 2 years before he was consumed by full-time writing. His A Country Doctor's Notebook, written in 1925, has nine vivid descriptions of medical cases in rural Russia, mostly fact but part-fictionalized, and is most rewarding. Indeed, even in this "modern" age of medicine, I would still prescribe this book as required reading for medical students. For its human rather than clinical lessons.
One story in the book, Baptism By Rotation, describes the young doctor deep in the Russian steppe, in the middle of the night, called to a woman in labour with a transverse lie of child, lethal to both mother and baby if not corrected by version of the baby. He had graduated with honours in Obstetrics, but needs the help of an experienced midwife, and a couple of peeks of his textbook, before both patients are saved, just. Afterwards, in the early hours, in his room, sipping his "cooling tea" and flipping through the textbook chapter on "Dangers of Version", he realises "all the previously obscure passages became entirely comprehensible, as though they had been flooded with light". He had learnt it, then done it, then learnt it again, with deeper understanding. I guess that's what experience does: it shines a light on what you've been taught.

A Friend Who Would Understand Me

Anton Chekhov was 38 years old when he wrote "A Case History". He was already an experienced doctor and evocative writer, and some of his best short stories, including this one, effortlessly combined elements of both medicine and human nature. The dismal factory town in "A Case History",  to which a doctor is summoned, has all the depressing features of late 19th century Russia, or indeed of industrial Europe. Within it's walls languishes the neurasthenic daughter of the rich factory owner. She is always sick, tired and depressed.
Just a brief conversation and examination give the doctor the diagnosis - that of no diagnosis at all. Today, after a few tests, she would be labelled as depression or chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia. But Chekhov and his alter ego in the story know the real cause of her illness. She explains it herself in her last few words to the doctor: "I'd like to tell you what I think. It seems that I'm not ill, and I'm worried and terrified for that reason...I'm always having medical treatment and of course I'm thankful and I wouldn't say it's all a waste of time. I don't want to talk to doctors, though, but to someone close to me, a friend who would understand me and could convince me whether I'm right or wrong."
Of course, nothing is resolved, and the doctor moves on, out of the town, to the rest of his life.
Chekhov doesn't try to give us a feel-good story. But we feel better after reading it. Is it Schadenfreude? Maybe. Is it a confessional by proxy? Possibly. It's certainly real, and common, even in a different time and place.