Tuesday November 16, 2004

Medical Advance Saves Lives, Ruins Literary Device

Switzerland’s Valbella Clinic — which served as the setting for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain — is closing. Why? I don’t know, something about tuberculosis being curable for the last six decades.

“The last crisis was in the 1940s when you British invented penicillin,” a local health official tells The Guardian. “Almost overnight it was possible to treat tuberculosis. The clinics had to change their strategy, and started taking asthma patients instead.”

Unfortunately, we all know what a crummy metaphor asthma is for pre-war intellectual malaise.

(Via Bookslut.)