A PERSECUTED DOCTOR.

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 March 1911, Page 6

A PERSECUTED DOCTOR.

RUINED BY DOING HIS DUTY,

The tragic story of a country doctor in Upper Austria (writes the Vienna correspondent of the “Standard”) affords a close parallel to Ibsen’s play, “An Enemy of the people,” and has attracted wide-spread sympathy here, especially in medical circles. Dr Franz, the parish doctor of his native place, Riedau, a small market town of 800 inhabitants, made himself unpopular last summer by doing his duty in notifying to the district prefecture a case of typhoid which had occurred, in spite of the attempts of the burgomaster and other influential persons in the town to induce him- to hush it up. In consequence of the notification, some of the usual summer visitors stayed away from Riedau last year, and a body of military, who would otherwise have been billeted there during the manoeuvres, were sent elsewhere. The tradesmen of the place, with the burgomaster at the head thereupon organised a boycott of the doctor and his family in order to revenge themselves on him for the business they had lost. They refused to sell him provisions, organised mobs to break his windows, wrote threatening letters, and in fact, treated him just as the Land League do an Irish farmer who has incurred their displeasure. Finally, they dismissed him from his position as parish doctor. Dr Franz appealed to the prefect of the district, who at once took strong measures to support him. The parish council was dissolved, the burgomaster deposed, the dismissal of the doctor declared illegal, and the gendarmes were quartered in the place to protect him and his family. This, however, did not save Dr Franz from being ruined. His old patients refused to pay their bills, no new ones came, and at last, his health broke down under the strain of his position. A few days ago he died suddenly of a stroke, at the early age of 36, leaving his mother, wife and children nenniless.

The Austrian Medical Association has forbidden any doctor to take the vacant post and is endeavouring to induce the Government to provide for the family, on the ground, that the doctor has fallen a victim to the conscientious fulfilment of his duty to the State.