Historical meme redux

I just did this meme last month, but Stefan - half of the husband & wife team who keep the wonderful physics blog Backreaction - has tagged me again.

Stefan says I don't have to, but I'll play again - because it's nice to see how many different people read my blog if nothing else. (But as always, my tagging forward is completely without compulsion of any kind!)

Last time I did Ahotep I. This time I'll jump millennia forward and give you one of my favorite writers: Антон Павлович Чехов (Anton Pavlovich Chekhov)

1. He was a doctor throughout his life, and may have contracted the tuberculosis that killed him while practicing medicine in the labor camps of Siberia - not as a prisoner, but as a volunteer medic.
   
2. A poor boy who became a landowner, he spent much of his own money on building free clinics, schools, and a fire station.
   
3. On his deathbed, he drank champagne, something he'd been denied for years: it was too late to harm him.
   
4. He said: "Medicine is my lawful wife, but literature is my mistress" (Медицина — моя законная жена, а литература — любовница.)
   
5. His first play was The Seagull - but it premiered to such a disastrous reception that he renounced the theater forever. (He changed his mind after the play was successfully revived and wrote three more still-produced classics - Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, and The Cherry Orchard)
   
6. He moved from his estate near Moscow to Yalta for his health, but called it "my hot Siberia".
   
7. After his death, his body was taken from the German spa of Badenweiler to Moscow in a refrigerated car intended for oysters.

The rules are as follows:

1) Link to the person who tagged you.
2) List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
3) Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
4) Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.

Stefan only tagged 5 people, so I'll do the same. A mutant meme!

Zeno at Halfway There
Neal at Literal Minded
Brian at Laelaps
Incunabular of Incunabular
Karl at World Wide Webers

Again - feel completely free to ignore the tag. It never happened.