'Encouraging the Growth of Benign Flora'

Koumiss you’ll find in the Oxford English Dictionary between koulan* and kouprey**. The word is Tartar in origin and defined as “a fermented liquor prepared from mare’s milk, commonly used as a beverage by the Tartars and other Asiatic nomadic peoples.” It is also applied to the “spirituous liquor” distilled from this beverage. In 1901, Chekhov underwent the “koumiss cure” at Axyonovo, a Urals resort in Ufa Province that treated tubercular patients. With his wife, Olga Knipper, Chekhov spent his honeymoon there. Writing on this date, June 23, in 1901, Chekhov tells his friend Vasily Sobolevsky, the editor of Russian Bulletin:

“During my koumiss cure here I’ve gained ten pounds and my cough has grown weaker, but all the same I’ll be returning home with exactly what I brought here: dull sound beneath the clavicle.”

The translators are Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky in Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973). In a footnote, Karlinsky explains that before the discovery of x-rays, the customary method for examining a patient with tuberculosis was to thump him on the chest: “The quality of sound obtained and its location informed the doctor of the extent of damage to the lung.” Chekhov adds: “I’ve been drinking koumiss, but I haven’t been able to drink more than four bottles a day; otherwise I get sick to my stomach.”

A brief online search suggests koumiss might have some therapeutic effect, acting as a diuretic and thus relieving mucous membranes of congestion. It’s hardly a cure for tuberculosis but might relieve symptoms. The disease killed Chekhov three years later. He was a doctor. Typically, even though he’s the one at the health resort, he spends half the letter diagnosing Sobolevsky and prescribing treatment:

“Your degeneration of the arteries or what is known as atheromatosis [fatty deposits on the lining of arteries], is as natural at your age as hair turning gray . . . You should do a lot of walking but do not exhaust yourself; avoid beef and eat fowl, veal, fish and ham; don’t drink any alcohol, not even a drop; if you must, drink only beer, but make sure it’s high-quality beer . . .”

According to Donald Rayfield in Anton Chekhov: A Life (1997) Dr. Vladimir Shchurovsky examined Chekhov, observed lesions and “irreversible necrosis” in both lungs, and prescribed the koumiss cure. Rayfield continues:

“For the first time since childhood, Anton put on weight. Four bottles of koumiss daily made him twelve pounds heavier by mid-June. Fermented mares’ milk was easily digestible. It was also thought to raise the body’s defences against tuberculosis, encouraging the growth of benign flora at the expense of tubercular bacilli in the gut. Olga, although she found her own ten stone weight [140 pounds] excessive, tried it herself. Koumiss made them drowsy, drunk and lascivious.”

*koulan: “a species or sub-species of equine quadruped (Equus onager), closely allied to the Dziggetai (with which it is united by some), found in central and southern Asia: the wild ass of Mesopotamia (Iraq), Persia (Iran), and the banks of the Indus.”

**kouprey: “a large wild ox, Novibos (or Bos) sauveli, first discovered in Cambodia in 1937.”