Summary
The doctor lays his head on the patient's chest. He concludes once more that the patient is healthy, and begins reflecting on what he went through to tend to this young man who is perfectly fine. He imagines that he would have traveled on pigs if the groom had offered them instead of horses, and remembers once again how he sacrificed Rosa for the groom's help.
He cannot stop thinking about Rosa, whom he describes as beautiful, and becomes frustrated with the family for taking her away from him.
Just as the doctor is packing his things to leave, he sees the patient's sister holding a bloody towel. He thinks that perhaps the young man is indeed unwell, and examines him again. This time, the doctor sees a large wound on the patient's hip. As he looks closer, he notices worms crawling out of the wound. The doctor concludes that the young man is dying.
The family and the townspeople strip the doctor naked and sing a chant about killing him if he does not heal the patient. They lay him next to the patient's wound.
The patient tells the doctor he does not have any confidence in him, and the doctor asks the patient what he expects him to do. He tells the patient that his wound is not that bad, that it was made with two blows from an axe and that he has seen much worse. The patient listens to him and goes still.
The doctor escapes by throwing himself out the window onto his horses. He does not get dressed beforehand because he does not want to waste time. His fur coat hangs off the back of the carriage and he tells the horses to "giddy up," but they no longer move as quickly as they once did.
The doctor realizes that he will never make it home. He thinks of how his practice will be taken over by someone else, and he thinks of Rosa who is at the mercy of the groom. The doctor feels betrayed by his patients, and declares that his choice to respond to the call at night was a mistake.
Analysis
By the halfway point of the story, readers will likely recognize that the doctor's narrative is not entirely realistic. The small moments of surrealism that peppered the first half of the story only become more bizarre in the second half as the doctor transforms from alleged hero to unfortunate victim. The combination of these surreal events and the doctor's eventual demise introduces the story's central theme of existential dread.
Existentialism is a line of inquiry that focuses on the nature of human existence, and one of its key tenets is the concept of existential angst, dread, or confusion. This term denotes the feelings of powerlessness and confusion one has amidst the events of an absurd world. When applied to "A Country Doctor," this dread is embodied by the doctor who, as a purported servant to the people of the rural community, loses his own humanity as the townspeople begin to treat him like a tool they must use to cure the sick.
While they originally invite the doctor in with warm welcome and reverence – taking his coat and preparing him a drink – his assessment that the patient is dying leads them to abandon the doctor and even threaten to kill him if he cannot save the patient. Against these threats from the townsfolk the doctor is entirely powerless; he lets them undress him and allows himself to be laid next to the dying man's wound as a choir of children chant in the background. In other words, the doctor appears helpless in the face of an absurd series of events.
The story suggests that the doctor's inability to transcend his station as a doctor – to remember his own humanity – is what ultimately leads to his demise. Having refused to act with any agency throughout the story, the doctor's escape fails miserably: he does not dress himself and is left to freeze atop his now slow-moving horses.
That the doctor blames his patients for his fall – "no one from the nimble rabble of patients lifts a finger" (5) – suggests that, even upon recognizing his fate, the doctor has not moved beyond conceptualizing himself as anything other than a doctor. While he declares that he has been "betrayed" by the people he serves, the story ultimately implies that it is the doctor who has allowed himself to be manipulated by everyone else – the groom, the patient's family, and the townspeople (5). If one interprets "A Country Doctor" as a type of waking dream, the story presents an existential quandary in which the relationship between the individual and their community is rendered tenuous by unreal events within a subconscious landscape.
