: A rural woman drinks a bottle of belladonna, a miller takes ten quinine powders at once, a man sticks a mustard plaster on a sheepskin coat. These cases prompt the young doctor to fight the darkness of ignorance.

The narration is on behalf of a young doctor, whose name is not mentioned in the story. The action takes place in 1917.

The young doctor celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday - the first on the deaf N-th site. Winter, in the courtyard - cold and snow, “Egyptian darkness”, as the paramedic aptly put it. After drinking a glass of diluted alcohol and eating “county sprats”, the doctor, two midwives and a paramedic began to recall funny cases from practice.

The first thing I remembered was the morning meal and the “ruddy butterfly of about thirty years old”, who assured me that I drank a vial of belladonna infusion in two doses - the strongest poison that had to be taken carefully, five drops a day. Signs of belladonna poisoning in the "butterfly" were not observed, and she demanded another portion.

The paramedic believed that the woman treated the neighbors with drops.

They are, doctor, because they do. Such an artist will go to the hospital, they will prescribe medicine for her, and she will come to the village and treat all the women.

The woman did not receive a new portion.The doctor wrote her valerian and still could not understand what the woman did with the belladonna.

Then I remembered Leopold Leopoldovich, the previous doctor of the N-site, whom the peasants respected very much. One day he prescribed French mustard plasters against laryngitis to a dense peasant, ordered one to be stuck on his back, the second on his chest and removed in ten minutes.

Two days later, a man appeared at the reception complaining that mustard plasters are not helping. It turned out that he stuck them directly on the sheepskin coat, and walked for two days.

One of the midwives said that she came to a difficult birth and found refined sugar in the woman’s birth canal. This grandmother, a sorceress, decided to entice “for sweet” a baby who could not have been born.

Both midwives began vying to list the wild customs that still exist in the villages. Women filled their mouths with bristles - it was a good omen. Once, when the fetus was in the wrong position, the woman in labor was hung upside down so that the baby would roll over and one midwife undertook to puncture the fetal bladder and kill the child.

The guests have left. Before the doctor went to bed, the sick man arrived. It was a miller suffering from malaria. To the doctor, he seemed a pleasant and intelligent person.

The miller's speech was sensible. In addition, he turned out to be literate, and even every gesture of him was saturated with respect for the science that I consider my favorite - for medicine.

The doctor put the miller in the room and prescribed quinine - one powder before each attack. At night, the doctors woke up and said that the miller was dying.It turned out that he decided to drink all the quinine powders at once, so as not to mess around.

The rest of the night the doctor pumped out the miller, did him a gastric lavage. In the morning, already falling asleep, he firmly decided that he would always fight against ignorance, with this Egyptian darkness.