A Country Doctor (short story)

"A Country Doctor"
Short story by Franz Kafka
First edition
Original titleEin Landarzt
LanguageGerman
Publication
Publication typeAnthology
PublisherKurt Wolff
Publication date1919

"A Country Doctor" (German: "Ein Landarzt") is a short story written in 1917 by Franz Kafka. It "first appeared in Kurt Wolff's 1918 anthology Die Neue Dichtung (The New Literature) and then in early 1920 as the title piece in Kafka's second collection of stories". In the story, a country doctor makes an emergency visit to a sick patient on a winter night. The doctor faces absurd, surreal predicaments that pull him along and finally doom him.