MOSCOW — The hospital treating the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny sent him back to prison on Monday, despite the strenuous objection of his doctor, who said he had apparently been poisoned with a “toxic agent” in the wake of some of the largest anti-Kremlin protests held in Moscow for years.

The doctor, Anastasy Vasilyeva, said insufficient tests had been conducted on the cause of Mr. Navalny’s condition to return him to the place where she said the toxic exposure probably occurred. After being allowed to see him, Dr. Vasilyeva wrote on Facebook that Mr. Navalny was feeling better but needed continued monitoring.

Mr. Navalny, 43, the most prominent critic of President Vladimir V. Putin and his government, was rushed to the hospital on Sunday from his jail cell, suffering from swelling and hives, which officials described as an allergic reaction. He was sentenced last week to 30 days in jail for organizing an illegal protest, days before a demonstration he had called drew thousands of people in Moscow on Saturday.

Dr. Vasilyeva, who had treated him previously, said on Sunday that Mr. Navalny might have been poisoned with an unknown chemical substance. The Interfax news agency quoted a doctor at the government hospital where he was admitted as saying that he had suffered from an attack of hives, but had improved.

Unease among his fellow opposition members and supporters stemmed from the Kremlin’s long history of eliminating its opponents, often by poisoning them.

Mr. Putin has tried to build an image of a powerful, united Russia, and anyone who would undermine that strength or point out that much of the country lives in poverty is often the target of official ire.

Independent journalists, rights advocates, opposition politicians, government whistle-blowers and others are smeared in the media, jailed on dubious charges and, in some cases, killed. Mr. Navalny himself temporarily lost most of the vision in one eye when someone threw a caustic liquid into his face in 2017.

Sergei V. Skripal, a former Russian spy, was poisoned along with his daughter in Salisbury, England, last year with a potent nerve agent administered by two officers from Russia’s military intelligence, Britain said. Russia has denied any involvement despite the officers’ being caught by surveillance cameras wandering around Salisbury.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, another opposition leader, has accused the government of poisoning him twice, sending him into a coma in the latest attempt in 2017, although medical tests conducted abroad proved inconclusive.

Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former officer in the Russian security service F.S.B. who became a Putin opponent, died of polonium-210 poisoning in London in 2006.

Boris Nemtsov, a prominent opposition politician, was fatally shot outside the Kremlin in February 2015. Although several figures from Chechnya were convicted in the killing, neither the mastermind nor a motive was ever identified.

Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor, was jailed on tax evasion charges while investigating a $230 million government tax “refund” that corrupt Russian officials had granted to themselves. Denied essential medical care, he died in 2009.

The journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a critic of Mr. Putin who wrote of atrocities by the Russian military in Chechnya, was shot to death in her Moscow apartment in 2006.

And in a case dating back even further, Yuri Shchekochikhin, a Russian journalist and politician famous for his corruption exposés, fell ill and died suddenly in 2003. His death was attributed to a rare allergic reaction, but the case was never fully resolved publicly.

Analysts have described both Mr. Navalny’s medical emergency and the mass detentions on Saturday, when the police carted away almost 1,400 protesters, as possible signs of the Kremlin’s unease about Mr. Putin’s continued drop in the polls, with Russians grumbling about their stagnant incomes. They said that instead of doing the hard work of changing policies to woo those who are angry with Kremlin, the government is trying to silence them.

The immediate cause of the Moscow protests was anger over Moscow City Electoral Commission’s preventing opposition candidates from registering for the September election for the 45-member city council. Fifty-seven potential candidates were blocked, including about 17 government critics.

“There are thousands of Muscovites behind every opposition member that was not allowed to run,” Nikolai Petrov, a Russian political science professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, wrote in the Vedomosti daily. “Today these are the people, and not just 17 unregistered candidates, who are in the position of being very harsh critics of the government.”

Hence the crackdown will feed more protests, he said, adding that “it is hard to imagine what they will do next, but it won’t be pleasant for the government.”

The next Moscow protest is scheduled for Saturday.

Neil MacFarquhar, the Moscow bureau chief, was previously the bureau chief at the United Nations and in Cairo, and held several assignments in the Middle East. @NeilMacFarquhar

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