"A Country Doctor" is a short story written in 1917 by Franz Kafka. It was first published in the collection of short stories of the same title. 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. A Country Doctor is perhaps Kafka's most fantastical or surreal work. It takes its cue from Gothic literature - it has echoes of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne - and analysing and identifying the core 'meaning' of the story has proved tricky. Even when set aside Kafka's other work, 'A Country Doctor' remains particularly cryptic and opaque.