Franz Kafka

Ein Landarzt Franz Kafka

A country doctor is a story by Franz Kafka. It originated in 1917 and was first published in 1918 in "The New Poetry - An Almanac by Kurt Wolff Verlag". It gave its name to Kafka's volume of the same name, published in 1920, which contained thirteen other prose texts. Kafka may have been inspired by an uncle Siegfried Löwy, who worked as a country doctor in a small town in Moravia. In a letter to Max Brod, Kafka says about this uncle: "And he lives in the country, unbreakable, contented, just like a quietly rushing madness that can be made to be the melody of life". Kafka's diary on October 9, 1911 describes a dream of a brothel with a harlot, whose entire body "was covered with large sealing-red circles with pale edges and scattered red splashes in between". On August 12, 1917, Kafka suffered a violent hemorrhage related to his tuberculosis, from which he eventually died. On September 5, 1917, he wrote to Max Brod that he "predicted" his illness with the "blood wound" in the country doctor. Kafka himself described A Country Doctor as one of his few really successful stories.