child (she had six children altogether) and led her Munich doctors to send her for months at a time to various fashionable retreats in the Swiss valleys—which included Dr Friedrich Jessen’s Waldsanatorium in Davos—might ‘have cleared up of itself’. Or perhaps she had never had ‘incipient’ TB in the first place? Four years before she published her memoir, a lung specialist, Professor Christian Virchow, had looked at the well-preserved X-ray films from 1912 and told her that for all his ‘intensive study there was no finding to suggest incipient tuberculosis’. In their biography Frau Thomas Mann (2003) Inge and Walter Jens reveal that Katia Mann wouldn’t countenance any talk of a diagnostic error—‘implying of course that The Magic Mountain novel would in significant parts have been based on a medical mistake’. Whether a mistake or not, it doesn’t in the least detract from the novel, which at one level explores all the possibilities of human wilfulness and perversity, and not always those generated by ‘illnesses’. German doctors don’t contradict their rich patients who have private insurance today, quite the reverse; and there is no reason to imagine they did in the 1910s either. A sarcastic letter-writer once termed this ‘opulence-based’ medicine. Katia Mann died in 1980, aged ninety-seven.

The Life and Times of Ernst Weiss [Times Literary Supplement, 2010, essay-review of Ernst Weiss’ novel Georg Letham:Arzt und Mörder, translated by Joel Rotenberg] I have written about Ernst Weiss elsewhere, and the rather sensationalist account of Hitler’s ‘conversion experience’ under hypnosis in 1918 as described in his novel The Eyewitness (1963). It has to be said that for want of reliable documentary testimony this episode receives only glancing mention in the major biographies, although Hitler seems to refer to it himself in Mein Kampf. Whatever happened in Dr Forster’s Brandenburg clinic, the Führer’s behaviour was more obviously influenced by another physician entirely: his ‘Leibarzt’ or personal physician, the shadowy Theodor Gilbert Morell, whom most of the Nazi leadership dismissed (with good reason) as a quack. In addition to cocaine eyedrops, the ‘tonic’ injections of the ‘Reichsspritzenminister’ are known to have included methamphetamine, strychnine and other dubious substances.

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