the building of barracks, and so on, and I feel lonely, for all the cholera
business is alien to my heart, and the work, which involves continual
driving about, talking, and attention to petty details, is exhausting for
me. I have no time to write. Literature has been thrown aside for a long
time now, and I am poverty-stricken, as I thought it convenient for myself
and my independence to refuse the remuneration received by the section
doctors. I am bored, but there is a great deal that is interesting in
cholera if you look at it from a detached point of view. I am sorry you are
not in Russia. Material for short letters is being wasted. There is more
good than bad, and in that cholera is a great contrast to the famine which
we watched in the winter. Now all are working--they are working furiously.
At the fair at Nizhni they are doing marvels which might force even Tolstoy
to take a respectful attitude to medicine and the intervention of cultured
people generally in life. It seems as though they had got a hold on the
cholera. They have not only decreased the number of cases, but also the
percentage of deaths. In immense Moscow the cholera does not exceed fifty
cases a week, while on the Don it is a thousand a day--an impressive
difference. We district doctors are getting ready; our plan of action is
definite, and there are grounds for supposing that in our parts we too
shall decrease the percentage of mortality from cholera. We have no
assistants, one has to be doctor and sanitary attendant at one and the same
time. The peasants are rude, dirty in their habits, and mistrustful; but
the thought that our labours are not thrown away makes all that scarcely
noticeable. Of all the Serpuhovo doctors I am the most pitiable; I have a
scurvy carriage and horses, I don't know the roads, I see nothing by
evening light, I have no money, I am very quickly exhausted, and worst of
all, I can never forget that I ought to be writing, and I long to spit on
the cholera and sit down and write to you, and I long to talk to you. I am
in absolute loneliness.