Antonia Saw the Oryx First by Maria Thomas

Marilyn McEntyre — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 13:32:53 +0000

Antonia Redmond is a young Harvard-trained doctor who has returned to the East African village where she was raised by American parents. Her goal is to establish a medical practice in the village. Her efforts are frustrated by inadequate supplies and funding, an under-trained staff, and patients whose superstitions and mistrust make diagnosis and treatment difficult. She deals daily with a conflict of cultures, trying to maintain her medical methods and standards in an environment where she competes with the authority of native healers.

Esther, daughter of a native healer who has some familiarity with and respect for Western medicine, envies and longs for Antonia’s Western training and attaches herself to her as a disciple. In her encounters with patients, Esther finds that she has an inexplicable gift for healing which baffles her as well as Antonia and complicates their already tenuous relationship. Esther’s gift forces Antonia to reexamine some of her most basic assumptions about what constitutes healing.

The novel raises complex questions about the cultural, religious, and institutional contexts of medicine in a delicately drawn portrayal of relationships among characters whose divergent frames of reference complicate trust and understanding. One of the questions the novel addresses is not only how to heal the body, but how to heal the breach between cultures. In the development of the friendship between the American doctor and the African healer these questions are worked out in concrete particulars that fully honor both the pain and the hope involved in authentic cross-cultural dialogue.

Antonia Saw the Oryx First
Maria Thomas
Soho Press, New York 2007: 296 pages

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database. 
Web image by medhum.org.

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Jack Coulehan — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 15:40:22 +0000

Chekhov by Osip Braz

Kirilov is the district doctor. His six-year-old son has just this moment died of diphtheria. He stands watching his wife caress the body as the doorbell rings. It is a wealthy stranger (Abogin) who begs the Doctor to come treat his wife who is in great pain. Kirilov says that he cannot possibly leave his wife at this time. Abogin insists, however, claiming that the doctor must know how terrible it is to witness the illness of a loved one and that his home is close-by. Kirilov relents.

But when they arrive at Abogin’s house, his wife is not home. She has pretended to be ill so that her husband would leave the house allowing her to run away with her lover. Abogin is crushed and begins to complain to Kirilov. Kirilov is fiercely angry that he has been dragged from his son’s death-bed to hear Abogin’s love troubles. They scream at one another, and the doctor returns home, with a firm and undying conviction that all those with money deserve his hatred.

Chekhov suggests that grief and misery do not bring people together to share, but force them apart. Pain is egotistic. The story also reflects on the status of doctors. When Abogin tries to lure the Doctor from his house, he speaks of the noble, self-sacrificing profession of medicine. However, he has so little respect for Kirilov as to hound him, then offer him money to absolve the insult. Kirilov, meanwhile, unjustly forms a prejudice against the rich that will never leave him.

Original Source: The Tales of Chekhov, Vol. 11: The Schoolmaster and Other Stories
Publisher: Ecco, 1986 | First published in 1887
Alternate Source: Chekhov’s Doctors, edited by Jack Coulehan
Publisher: Kent State University Press, 2003
Translated by: Constance Garnett
Places Published: New York; Kent, Ohio & London

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

Physician Experience – medhum.org

Antonia Saw the Oryx First by Maria Thomas

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Enemies by Anton Chekhov

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