Fresh out of medical school, a young doctor is dropped alone into a remote rural practice in revolutionary-era Russia, where he must bluff, improvise, and teach himself surgery on desperate patients with only a stack of textbooks and his own terror to guide him.
Books mentioned in A Country Doctor's Notebook (5)
The Deerslayer by Fenimore Cooper: “the same hunger that in childhood I had longed for Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer.”
Operative Obstetrics by Albert Döderlein: “"There it was—Döderlein's Operative Obstetrics." / "In a pool of light on the desk in my study lay Döderlein open at the page headed 'Dangers of Version'." — the doctor's real reference textbook, consulted repeatedly.”
The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper: “...for many a long evening I paced up and down the length of my study, longing for newspapers with the same hunger that in childhood I had longed for Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer.”
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: “It reminds me of a passage in War and Peace in which Petya Rostov experiences the same phenomenon when half asleep.”
The Penal Colony of Sakhalin by Anton Chekhov: “"I recalled a book in a yellow binding entitled The Penal Colony of Sakhalin, which contained photographs of various criminal types." — medium confidence, likely this edition's translated title for Chekhov's Sakhalin Island.”