Hans Castorp's journey-to-knowledge of disease and health in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

The paper examines Thomas Mann's novel, The Magic Mountain, to show how imaginative literature can enhance our understanding of health in place. The story centers on the experiences of Hans Castorp, a young bourgeois German, at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. Three themes are examined: (1) how knowledge about illness and health, death and life, is gained; (2) how knowledge is arrived at through a dialectical process which reconciles seeming opposites; and(3) how new knowledge is gained through making transitions. Lessons for health geography are drawn from analysis of the three themes.