Anton Chekhov’s Ward No 6 - asylum life before modern psychopharmacology with Professor Femi Oyebode, recorded at the BAP 2024 Summer Meeting in Birmingham
Anton Chekhov was born 16 January 1860 at Taganrog, the 3rd of 7 children of a shopkeeper & grandson of a serf. He studied medicine at the University of Moscow, graduating in 1884. He was first diagnosed with TB in 1897 and he died of TB in February 1904. In this talk I will introduce some aspects of Chekhov’s poetics as revealed in his letters and the importance both of medicine and literature in his life. Chekhov is well known as much for his plays such as The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya, as for his short stories. I will concentrate on his novella Ward No. 6 which is reputed for its impact on Lenin, as an allegory of Russia, before the Bolshevik Revolution. It is also revelatory for psychiatrists, as it deals with the social realities of asylums in Russia prior to the Revolution. I will show how along with other historical documents it gives good insight into what life was like for psychiatric patients before the introduction of modern drug treatments.
Professor Femi Oyebode is an expert in descriptive and clinical psychopathology. He is an authority on the cognitive neuropsychiatry of delusional misidentification syndromes and on other rare and unusual psychiatric syndromes. He is the author of 'Sims’ Symptoms in the Mind: textbook of descriptive psychopathology'. This is the leading English language text on psychopathology and has been translated into Estonian, Italian, Korean and Portuguese He is also a recognised expert in medical humanities writing about the value of literature to medicine.
