[In the following essay, Brancato interprets Franz Kafka's "A Country Doctor" as a work concerned with the ultimate inadequacy of science.]

Kafka's "A Country Doctor" is a surrealistic tale about the powerlessness of scientific man in confrontation with the brute force of nature. Although Kafka suggests the cyclical and interdependent aspects of all life, he makes it very clear that only man has the capacity to feel ultimately betrayed by life. This short story captures a profound sense of futility through its nightmarish quality. Coming to the end of "A Country Doctor" has the same effect as waking from a bad dream—the incubus has been lifted and we are relieved, but we also know that our anxieties, crystallized by the dream, are still very much with us.

Kafka uses a country doctor's experience, real or imagined, as a metaphor for the failure of scientific man to assuage the pain of dying. The doctor answers his alarm bell, which warns him of the death of one of his patients, but the alarm turns out to be a "false alarm," since he can do nothing to save his patient or himself from death. Equating the consciousness of the doctor with scientific knowledge, Kafka suggests that although modern man has tried to make science replace his ancient beliefs, it is unable to perform well in this sacred capacity. Modern man has worshipped science, and scientists have assumed the role of gods. Because of this apotheosis, when scientists find themselves impotent in the face of death, their self-condemnation is as great as the condemnation that they are subjected to by the general populace. In this story the country doctor becomes as helpless as the patients he is trying to cure. (An archaic meaning of the word "patient," by the way, is "to be acted upon rather than acting.")

Throughout the story we see evidence of the doctor's helplessness. When we first meet him he is in "great perplexity." He has answered his night bell but is "forlorn," "distressed," and "confused" about how to get to his "seriously ill patient." Although nature is working against him (the blizzard, the death of his own horse), he is willing to accept his role as country doctor if he can find a means of getting to the patient. When his servant Rose returns from seeking assistance, she confirms what he already knows—that no one has volunteered to help him. We see the doctor, however thwarted, accepting his role despite human selfishness and indifference. Up to this point in the story the reader can identify with the setting and the situation on a realistic level. It is then that the nightmarish quality of the plot begins.

In the dreamlike incidents that follow, Kafka gives us further objectification of the doctor's sense of futility and betrayal. There is a proliferation of those uncontrollable forces of nature that so often determine what we can and cannot do in life. On his own property the doctor discovers two horses and a groom in an abandoned pigsty. As he looks into the open door of the sty, he discovers, crouched on his hams, a groom who offers to yoke up two horses. The doctor and Rose laugh at what they unexpectedly find in their own backyard. In language that suggests the process of defecation (a basic, natural process), the doctor describes the emergence of the horses from the sty—horses who "by sheer strength of buttocking squeezed out through the door hole," and whose bodies "steam thickly." The doctor's momentary relief at finding a way to get to his patient is negated when the groom bites Rose's face. The doctor calls the groom a "brute" but at the same moment feels he cannot condemn one who is offering help when no one else has. Sensing this acceptance, the groom does not even respond to the doctor's threat. ("Do you want a whipping?") The entire sequence suggests man's dilemma in confrontation with the inexplicable forces of nature. From out of his "yearlong uninhabited pigsty" (his farm is effete) comes an opportunity to get where he wants to go. The condition is that he will have to lose Rose, his only human contact on the farm and a person whom he has taken for granted. Nature, benign or malignant, has offered help, but not without exacting a toll. The scientist must often abandon his own comforts and humane concerns if he wants to have any effect at all. He laments the loss of his Rose, but he justifies his complicity with the groom by telling himself that he is doing his official duty.

The groom may represent natural man—or the devil. (One meaning of the word groom—"a forked stick used by thatchers"—is reminiscent of representations of the devil.) The doctor's involvement with the groom is another source of his growing sense of powerlessness. The groom not only prepares the way for the doctor to fulfill his official business but also becomes Rose's "bridegroom." Although the doctor feebly protests, he can do nothing to keep the groom from this unwilling and frightened "bride." The scientist has lost control of himself, and in a "storming rush" that buffets all his senses, he arrives at his patient's house, which turns out to be uncannily close (suggesting a growing human bond). The implication is that the scientific man may submerge his own basic sexual impulses in order to answer a more altruistic call. His willingness to accept help that requires the sacrifice of Rose, however, may make him seem in league with the devil rather than God. Expediency, Kafka seems to be saying, is the rule for the modern scientist.

The veneration of his patient's family only makes the doctor feel greater powerlessness. After he is "almost lifted" out of his gig by the parents and sister, he finds himself in the "unbreathable" air of the sickroom. He wants to open a window, but duty calls him directly to his patient. The boy entreats the doctor to let him die (as though he could control life and death), while the doctor thinks "blasphemously" about the helpful gods who got him to his patient. He is reminded at this point that he cannot return to save Rose because the horses cannot be controlled. The horses, just at this moment, do what the doctor himself didn't do—they maneuver the windows open with their heads, and the parents, afraid of such unbridled forces, cry out. The horses, Brother and Sister, suggest the incubus and succubus that the family fear will take the boy's life.

Although the doctor would like to return home, he allows himself to be "cajoled" closer to the bed and "yields" to examine the boy. One of the horses whinnies loudly as the doctor puts his head to the boy's breast. (The succubus does not want the doctor to help the boy.) Oddly, the doctor finds nothing wrong with his patient. He has done his duty however, and he rationalizes his failure to find anything wrong by saying "the boy might have his way, and I wanted to die too." The doctor admits defeat: "to write prescriptions is easy," he says, "but to come to an understanding with people is hard."

Kafka has crystalized here the dilemma of the modern scientist: he can be honest or he can offer placebos. The country doctor would like to avoid the dilemma entirely, but the evidence of the "blood-soaked towel" finally gets him to admit "conditionally" that the boy is as seriously ill as he has told us at the beginning of the narrative. The horses' whinnying together at this point may be doing so not, as the doctor thinks, because the sound is "ordained in heaven" to assist his examination, but to protest his interference with the death process.

The doctor admits to the true enormity of the force he is fighting when he gives a "low whistle of surprise at the rose-red wound containing worms that "wriggle toward the light." Here the doctor suddenly uses the past tense, as if in an afterlife, to tell the boy he was past helping. The wound itself suggests cyclic regeneration. (The worms are feeding on the wound that is killing the boy.) The doctor calls the wound the "blossom" in the boy's side. Out of destruction, the scientist knows, new life will emerge.

Again the doctor is powerless—he cannot communicate what he has seen and what he knows to be the bitter truth. The boy's family won't let him. The doctor is forced to act the role of God. They are pleased that the doctor has acted by busying himself with the boy, but the doctor knows his service is futile. "They misuse me for 'sacred services'" he thinks, while the parson, who once might have offered the consolation they need, uselessly "unravels his vestments." The doctor knows he is not omnipotent, but the mystical choir is being taught nevertheless to sing "Only a doctor, only a doctor." Even after he is stripped and placed in bed with the boy, he must suffer the accusations of the dying patient. He tries to comfort the boy by telling him that his wound is not as bad as some—he even gives the boy the "word of honor of an official doctor" on this point. Here again we see the physician forced into a situation that he tries to make the best of. The doctor's being placed at the right side of the boy's wound does not position the boy at the right hand of God but on the left hand of Science, a false god. After the doctor has shared the deathbed with the boy for a little while and has attempted to mitigate his fears, he decides it is time to go home. He leaves without bothering to put on his clothes, since he hopes to be home as quickly as he came. This is not the case, and, still stripped of his clothes, recognizing a "new but faulty" song of the children that goes "O be joyful, all you patients, The doctor's laid in bed beside you!" he mounts a horse. The horses are no longer Brother and Sister but old men crawling through the "snowy wastes."

He will not reach home, for he is being led to his death by the "unearthly horses." His impotence is once again underlined when he cannot reach the fur coat hanging from a hook on the back of the gig. He knows and we know that "it [dying] cannot be made good, not ever." The inscrutable forces of nature move on, and although no one can ever take the doctor's place, his irreplaceability is no comfort to him. He is alone and alienated. No one will lift a finger to help him in the end. The alarm has indeed been false, for there is nothing he can do to keep the end from being hard. Once man tries to act by answering the night bell, he loses his innocence and feels disappointed when his presumptions about having power turn out to be incorrect. This age, for Kafka, seems the "most unhappy of ages," for science is no better than religion in assuaging pain—the pain of knowing that we must all die. "Betrayed! Betrayed!" is the country doctor's cry, and we know the reason.