This edition brings together seven medically-themed short stories by Anton Chekhov—a practicing physician as well as an accomplished writer who thought deeply about the relationship between literature and medicine. Each story has been freshly translated and includes explanatory footnotes to aid interpretation. The edition also features an introduction on Chekhov’s life and times and a selection of contextual materials—most of them also freshly translated—that includes examples of Chekhov’s thinking, as articulated in his letters and autobiography, about literature and medicine; critical responses to Chekhov’s writing by some of his contemporaries; and excerpts from the memoirs of another late nineteenth-century Russian physician.