The Waiting Room by George Tooker

Felice Aull — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:18:08 +0000

We don’t know where this waiting room is, but the impression it conveys is one of anxiety, boredom, and anonymity.  People are distributed among numbered cubicles — ciphers who are thrown together and at the mercy of someone or something for which they are consigned to wait.  They wait in separation from each other, unspeaking.  The lighting is harsh, the room untidy and uncomfortable.  This could be a doctor’s office or a hospital waiting room, or any uncomfortable place where people are made to feel anonymous and at the beck and call of an unfeeling bureaucracy. 

Tooker depicted waiting for a more specifically governmental bureaucracy in his painting, “The Government Bureau.” In that painting, the waiting people are reproduced several times to emphasize their anonymity, and the multiple bureaucrats peer out from frosted windows with only their eyes and noses visible — bringing to mind the concept of the “medical gaze” promulgated by the French philosopher,  Michel Foucault.

In another Tooker painting, “Ward,” he renders patients’ anonymity and a sense of abandonment in the hospital setting–with government bureaucracy invoked by the American flags hanging on the wall.

Image Credit
The Waiting Room, George Tooker, 1959. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Image used for educational and critical commentary purposes.

George Tooker documentary videos from Columbus Museum

A Nervous Breakdown by Anton Chekhov

Jack Coulehan — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 15:40:22 +0000

Chekhov 1898 by Osip Braz

A medical student, Mayer, and an art student, Rybnikov, take their friend Vasilyev, a law student, out for a night on the town, visiting a few brothels on S. Street. After being fortified with a couple of glasses of vodka, they go to the first brothel, where Vasilyev is repulsed by “How cheap and stupid it all is!” After mixing with the women a bit, they go on to a second brothel, and then a third, and finally a fourth. Vasilyev is increasingly disgusted and begs to go home, but his friends dissuade him. At the last brothel, Vasilyev engages one of the whores in conversation: Why doesn’t she leave? Why doesn’t she better herself? But she yawns, obviously disinterested. A commotion ensues when one of the men slaps a whore, and Vasilyev runs out into the snowy street. His friends lead him home, while Vasilyev harangues them about the evils of prostitution. During the night, he has a “nervous breakdown” and in the morning his friends find him disoriented and incoherent. They take him to a psychiatrist, who agrees that prostitution is evil, but his attitude seems to be, “So what, don’t let it bother you. It’s just a natural part of society.”

Vasilyev is shaken to the core by his encounter with prostitution. He finds it morally repulsive and wants to “save” the women who practice it. Yet everyone else—his friends, the cab drivers, the psychiatrist, even the whores themselves—seems to accept prostitution as a normal aspect of society. Mayer, the medical student, even provides some statistics that indicate there are more whorehouses in London than in Moscow. Vasilyev doesn’t have the resilience to accommodate this moral dissonance in his worldview. Thus, he has a breakdown. Ironically, the psychiatrist is unable to even visualize the moral problem that Vasilyev is experiencing.

The Party and Other Stories
Anton Chekhov
London, Penguin Books, 1985.
Originally Published 1889

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).
Web image by Alex Plesovskich

alienation – medhum.org

The Waiting Room by George Tooker

A Nervous Breakdown by Anton Chekhov

Reviews of Chekhov’s Stories

Cold Eye, Warm Heart: Medicine and Anton Chekhov

An Awkward Business by Anton Chekhov

The Grasshopper by Anton Chekhov

Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov

Ionych by Anton Chekhov

A Doctor’s Visit by Anton Chekhov

A Nervous Breakdown by Anton Chekhov

Enemies by Anton Chekhov