Géza Csáth was a tragic physician-writer born in Szabadka, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1887. A talented musician, Csáth enrolled in the Budapest Medical School after the Academy of Music rejected him, perhaps in part because of Csáth’s love of atonal music (and therefore early appreciation of, and later a recognized music critic of, Bartók and Kodály.) As Birnbaum notes in her biographical sketch, Csáth began smoking opium in 1909, an addiction that effectively began the abrupt and violent downhill spiral of his life.

Practicing as a neurologist, Csáth did research while studying mental illness. (Indeed, one wonders if the addicted researcher in neurologic and mental processes saw in himself the protagonist of his short story The Surgeon--see this database). In 1913 Csáth left the halls of research and became a country doctor. His life is a chaotic turmoil henceforth with increasing opium addiction and a stint in World War I followed by physical and mental illness, which culminated when he shot his wife and attempted suicide in an insane asylum. In 1919, en route to Budapest following a successful escape, Csáth was detained by Serbian border guards, swallowed poison, and died.

As shocking as this story is, it pales next to some of the other tales in this collection, which Angela Carter, no mean purveyor of the weirdly fantastic story herself, calls, in a marvelous introduction, "an extraordinary, uneasy mixture of sentimentality, sadism, and sexual repression" (12). "Trepov on the Dissecting Table" has resonances with the work of three other physician-authors. The entire tale, its brevity, its marvelously ironic yet true ending, its depiction of the common folk of the earth and their innermost thoughts as expressed in action observed only by themselves and the reader--these are all pure Anton P. Chekhov.

The morbid, sacrilegious treatment of the dead by paramedical personnel reminds this reader of Richard Selzer’s A Blue Ribbon Affair (see this database), in which love, not violence, occurs in the presence of, and not to, a cadaver. Finally, Vanya’s flushed face and thrill in the execution of the profane act he is doing and the knowledge of where and to whom he is doing it, recall William Carlos Williams’s physician in The Use of Force (annotated by Felice Aull and also by Pamela Moore and Jack Coulehan) who remarks during the forceful examination of a little girl’s pharynx to see if she has diphtheria, "I could have torn the child apart in my own fury and enjoyed it. It was a pleasure to attack her. My face was burning with it" (see annotations). Williams’s physician is another health care giver who exerts unprofessional yet (or is it therefore?) gratifying violence on the patient, the recipient of what are usually benign attentions.