Tag: sanitarium
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Robert Klopstock: Kafka’s fellow patient, friend, and doctor
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “If I had known then what I know now, Franz would be sitting here talking to us.”– Robert Klopstock, M.D., to Kafka scholar Angel Flores, early 1940s Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born to a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague. He got a law degree at his father’s insistence but worked as a…
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Sanitariums as cure for consumption
The institutions variously called sanitariums (from sanare, “to cure”) or sanitariums (from sanitas, meaning “health”) became all the rage around 1850. They were especially popular with the upper classes, as exemplified in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain by the young Hans Castorp, who decides to spend a few days with a friend at a Swiss…