What, who and how was treated by Herzen's Dr. Krupov?

The Russian literature was relatively late in heeding attention to the social type of the doctor. Nameless medical doctors gradually appear in the novels of the first half of the 19th century, typically as episodic persons without characters. They are educated and intelligent people, thus pleasant to communicate with, and if necessary, medical help can be obtained from them. One of those who endowed their doctor heroes with names and human characters was A. I. Herzen. His works about Dr. Krupov fostered the subject of medicine in Russian and European literature. They are the legacy of Goethe’s Faust and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. Like Faust, Dr. Krupov is a philosopher who poses global questions, and like Werner, he is an ideologist, a skeptic, a reasoner and a materialist. Krupov’s theory that the world is insane, everyone is mentally ill, and the society, rather than patients, needs to be treated is actually not as unambiguous as it seems, if you believe the opinions of the character himself and the critics who wrote about Herzen’s story. The uncertainty of the author’s attitude to Krupov’s theory endows the text with ambivalence, a certain playfulness. Contradictions of political ideas and the impossibility of their execution are overcome in Herzen’s works about Dr. Krupov by literary means, such as irony, satire, parody. Herzen came to favor literature over medicine in treatment of social diseases.