A Country Doctor

A Country Doctor is a short story written by Franz Kafka and first published in 1917. This English translation was produced by AliceAndBooks from the original German text available through Project Gutenberg.

The story follows a country doctor summoned on an urgent winter night to attend a seriously ill patient. Unable to find a horse for the journey, he suddenly receives unexpected help from a mysterious groom, whose disturbing behavior leaves the doctor deeply uneasy about abandoning his home.

When he reaches the patient's house, the doctor at first finds no obvious illness, but soon discovers a horrifying and inexplicable wound. Surrounded by the patient's anxious family and increasingly powerless to control the situation, he becomes trapped in a strange sequence of events in which professional duty turns into helplessness and humiliation.

With its dreamlike logic and unsettling imagery, A Country Doctor explores isolation, responsibility, guilt, and the limits of human authority. The story is characteristic of Kafka's fiction, where ordinary circumstances gradually become absurd, threatening, and impossible to escape.

"I was in great difficulty: an urgent journey lay before me; a gravely ill man was waiting for me in a village ten miles away; a heavy blizzard filled the wide space between him and me; I had a carriage, light, with big wheels, exactly the thing for our country roads..."