Benjamin Miller's "Dictionnaire illustré"

One particularly helpful conference event in Davos for me as a translator was our visit to a temporary exhibition curated by a local medical historian and author, Benjamin Miller, who spent the first few years of his life living at the Berghotel Schatzalp and later ran it for a decade.

He had called this presentation a "Dictionnaire illustré", taking a quotation from "The Magic Mountain" and introducing us to the relevant item from his collection. It was great to be able to see the object and, once again, just the research that Thomas Mann put into creating a realistic setting for his novel.

The picture at the top of this post is a disinfection lamp, which heated a mixture of water and formalin to disinfect the rooms. It is referenced early in the novel:

"An American woman died here the day before yesterday," Joachim said. "Behrens was convinced she would be done before you arrived and that you could then have the room. Her fiancé was with her, an English naval officer, but he didn’t exactly keep his chin up. He came out into the corridor every minute to weep like a little boy, and then he rubbed cold cream into his cheeks because he was clean-shaven and the tears stung him. The American suffered two first-degree haemorrhages two nights ago, and that was it. But she was taken away yesterday morning, and then of course they fumigated the place thoroughly with formaldehyde solution, you know. It is apparently very good for such purposes."
(Miller also explained that cold cream was a mixture of beeswax, lavender and rosewater.)

Our old friend "Blue Henry" – or actually "Blue Peter" in English, as Miller confirmed. This poses a problem for my translation: stay literal (as John Woods was in his translation, incidentally) or use the period name, which also happens to be the title of a BBC children's programme from my youth? In any case, Miller explained that a patient would have three of these sputum flasks (one in use, one being disinfected and a spare). There were also aluminium models and cheaper paper versions that could be burnt after use.

This is the apparatus used to perform a pneumothorax operation, which collapsed the diseased lung to prevent the tubercules spreading. The cheap version involved filling the pleural space between the lung and the chest wall with liquid paraffin or paraffin balls; a more expensive procedure used nitrogen, as with the "inflated lady" in the novel:

"The pneumothorax—this still recent but ever more popular achievement of surgical technique, had proved brilliantly successful in her case too. […] Frau Zimmermann’s condition and constitution had been on a gratifying upward path, and her husband—she was married, though childless—could look forward to her return in three to four weeks. Then, for her own amusement, she went on an outing to Zurich; the trip was purely for her own amusement. And she had amused herself to her heart’s content, but she had become aware of the need to fill up and entrusted a local doctor with this task. A nice, funny, young man, hahaha, hahaha—but what had happened next? He had overfilled her!"

This "Rippenschere" or "rib scissors" was used to perform a rib resection (removal) in a gruseome procedure that barely needs describing. But describe it Dr Behrens does, in his own inimitable style:
"I’ve just come from an unequal battle, it was on a knife edge or a bone saw’s—serious business, you know, a rib resection. Fifty per cent used to stay on the slab. We’re better at it now, but we often have to knock off early, mortis causa. Anyway, today’s was a good sport, hung on bravely for a while . . ."

This is a "künstliche Höhensonne" or "artificial high-altitude sun" containing mercury and mass produced in Hanau, Germany, from 1920 for sale all over Europe. The original personal suntan studio! No quote as I haven't finished that section yet.

Oh, and X-rays (modelled here by Martina Schönbächler of the Thomas Mann Archive): there were 27 X-ray machines in Davos by 1910, which might have been one of the greatest densities of this still-recent technology anywhere in Europe.

An important postscript: I mentioned to Benjamin Miller that I'd been told during my October 2023 visit to the Berghotel Schatzalp that a door leading outside from the bottom of an elevator had been used to spirit away the corpses of dead residents when the hotel was still a sanatorium.

With an angry snort, he replied that this was nonsense: the back door was for bringing in coal! But he had in fact experienced the sudden death of a resident when he was growing up there. The guests had been hurriedly assembled for dinner and the dead body was carried out through the corridors.