Liječnikovi zapisci

Doctor's Notes by Filip Marušić-Davidović (1874–1944) are short prose works – memoirs, realistic prose based on the author's experience as a village doctor in Drniš and the surrounding Dalmatia. Marušić, a doctor, naturalist, writer and member of the old Poljica nobility, wrote this work as a kind of “doctor's diary” or a series of sketches from practice.

The book consists of a series of notes in which the author, writing from the perspective of a doctor, documents the everyday life of a Dalmatian peasant at the beginning of the 20th century. The emphasis is on the bitter reality of life, poverty, hygienic conditions, infectious diseases (malaria, tuberculosis, etc.), high child mortality and general misery in low shanty towns and bare shanties. Marušić does not embellish reality – he writes sharply, truthfully and with compassion for the weeping people of our blood.

The work belongs to the realistic trend of Croatian literature of that time. The author critically depicts social conditions: backwardness, lack of education, the influence of the clergy, the attitude of the authorities towards the village, and the consequences of long-term misery and neglect. At the same time, the notes have a humanistic, almost social-pedagogical tone – the doctor is not just an observer, but also a compassionate participant who fights for the health and dignity of his patients.

The style is simple, direct, and vivid. Marušić uses local color, dialectal expressions, and authentic details from medicine and everyday life to create a convincing picture of rural Dalmatia in the Austro-Hungarian period. The book is autobiographically colored – the author did indeed work as a doctor in the Drniš region, where he was active in both cultural and public life (befriended Don Fran Bulić, noticed talents such as the young Meštrović, etc.).

In the context of Croatian literature, The Doctor's Notes represent an important example of social prose and medicine in literature. They are similar to some works of European realism (e.g. sketches from the life of a doctor), but are deeply rooted in the Croatian rural and Dalmatian milieu.

Marušić later wrote poetry (Gorocvijet u dolini, 1926) and other medical and social works, but The Doctor's Notes remains his best-known and most characteristic work – a testimony of a humanist doctor about the suffering, resilience and everyday life of the Croatian countryside at the turn of the century.