Thomas Mann "The Magic Mountain"

Title: The Magic Mountain Original title: Zauberberg First edition: 1929 Medical themes: tuberculosis, the sanatorium in Davos, philosophical reflections on human anatomy, physiology, and biology Description: An outstanding book that is considered by many literary experts to be one of the greatest masterpieces. This novel, spanning over 900 pages, is multifaceted, touching on philosophy, politics, and love. Finally, it also addresses tuberculosis—and does so in an extraordinary way, highlighting its uniqueness, in a manner that allows it to be directly classified as a medical book. The main character of Mann’s novel is Hans Castorp, a twenty-year-old man who arrives in Davos to visit his cousin, Joachim Zienssen. The stay is initially supposed to last four weeks, but it turns out that young Hans also has lung lesions indicative of tuberculosis. The author thus takes us into the world of the sanatorium, the world of “The Mountain,” where weeks pass like days and years like months. This book is incredible: it draws you in, overwhelms you, and sensitizes you. Reading it enriches the reader. Besides, it is full of medical insights—I would even venture to say that every doctor should try to read it . “So we have atrophy, and the atrophy comes from places where calcification has already occurred, scarring, if you will. You have been a patient for a long time, Castorp, but you didn’t know it. If it were only a matter of the muffling and those scars in your organ of Aeolus, as well as those calcifications, I would send you back to your lares and penates. But in light of the overall test results, it’s not worth your while to go home, because you’d have to come back to us soon anyway. For besides the muffled sounds, you also have a harsh tone up there on the left side, which is almost a murmur and certainly comes from a new spot. I don’t want to speak of a focus of softening just yet, but it is, after all, a moist area. As objective evidence, we also have your temperature of 37.6 at ten in the morning—this roughly corresponds with the acoustic findings."