I found this article interesting and decided to share it with guppies. I am not sure if WA forum is an appropriate forum for this article but for now I have decided to open it here.
Swiss hospital breathes its last
By Emma Jane Kirby
BBC correspondent, Switzerland
In the 1920s and 30s, tuberculosis sufferers flocked to mountaintop clinics in the Swiss resort of Davos for the pure air. But today, with TB less of a threat, the clinics are closing down. Emma Jane Kirby has been to see the doors shutting on one of the hospitals that inspired German novelist Thomas Mann’s famous book, The Magic Mountain.
Mountains in Davos
Davos is famous for its pure mountain air
There’s something decidedly eerie about an empty hospital, and an empty, old hospital, half hidden by snow and overshadowed by heavy, threatening mountains has an even more sinister feel.
It was already dark when I arrived at the Valbella clinic.
Somewhere above the huge staircase came the animated sound of a small party at dinner and from along an unlit corridor I could just make out the repetitive sound of a woman coughing.
The entrance hall was strewn with medical
litter - a discarded old wheelchair by the door, a contorted breathing apparatus with an old rubber mask hanging by its side.
A giant 1920s photograph dominated the wall, boasting of the Valbella clinic in its heyday - a majestic facade of ornate balconies and balustrades, their splendour cunningly concealing the fact that this was a place where most people came not to indulge, but to die.
Dingy
The nurse who eventually rushed up to greet us, however, was a perfect specimen of 21st Century health.
Her cheeks were burnt brown from the winter sun and the strong muscles on her forearms offered no complaint as she swung my bag over her shoulder and showed me to my room.
I watched them wrap up to take their final ‘cure’ - a brisk walk among the snow heavy fir trees
She laughed as we made our way down the dingy corridor. “Don’t worry,” she grinned. “It’s not haunted, it just feels sad because we’re closing down.”
My room was very different to the one that Hans Castorp, the fictional hero of The Magic Mountain, stayed in.
For a start, mine had an en-suite shower and a radio and more importantly, unlike in poor Hans’ case, no-one had died in my bed the previous evening.
At least I don’t think that’s what the nurse was trying to say to me in her rapid Swiss German, as she plumped up the pillows and put an extra blanket over my duvet cover.
‘Cure’
Tuberculosis
TB is spread through the air after infected people cough or sneeze
At breakfast the next morning, I met the last of the clinic’s patients.
Not TB sufferers any more, but old men and women with bronchial complaints or chronic asthma, sent to Davos for a few weeks to escape the pollution of their home towns and to benefit from the pure mountain air.
I watched them wrap up to take their final “cure” - a brisk walk among the snow heavy fir trees, as the morning mist lifted ever higher over the mountain tops.
Hans Castorp and his 1920s friends would have been given similar treatment.
In the hospital archive, I leafed through photograph after photograph of young men and women lying on beds in the open air, swaddled in furs or blankets which were half swamped by snow drifts.
Wan faces peeped out under hats and scarves, fragile looking children dressed only in knickers, performed exercises on the mountain side and men clutching spittoons stared searchingly into the camera.
But for every desperate image I found, there was also its opposite number in decadence.
Dining tables, piled high with gluttonous quantities of cake and cream, flirtatious looking young men, leaning jauntily against elaborate lamp-posts and finely dressed ladies, looking confident of being asked for the next dance.
The photos made the sanatorium seem at once alluring and stifling.
There was something so inviting about the camaraderie of it all, something so foolishly romantic, until I remembered how few of those faces would have ever left the clinic and how shallow the pleasure must have been in taking life’s final fling.
Magic mountains
In a silent wood near to the clinic, a graveyard bears testimony to the hundreds of people whom Davos simply couldn’t help.
I’d been warned that most of the old headstones had now been removed, but after some determined searching among the newer stones, I did find a few names of ex-sanatorium patients, nearly all of whom had died before their 30th birthdays.
I never saw them and I never felt them, but I swear if ever a place was haunted, this old sanatorium was full of ghosts
They’d come from countries far and wide, desperate to believe in this little Swiss mountainside town and its, oh so magic, mountains.
Packing my case again, later that afternoon, I was disturbed by the sound of music floating down one of the clinic’s long corridors.
Tentatively, I pushed open a heavy wooden door and saw an old man, sitting huddled in a thick sweater at a piano.
He was playing Bach with his eyes half closed, his head swaying up and down, lulled by the rhythm of his fingers on the keyboard.
Sixty, perhaps 80 plastic chairs were laid out in the room in neat rows, all facing his piano, and all empty.
Haunted
From the lines of concentration etched on his forehead, I could see the man wasn’t just practising but was performing. He looked up suddenly and stopped playing.
“It’s only for myself,” he muttered in embarrassment. “I’m only playing for myself, for the old times.”
I persuaded him to play for me. But sitting in that draughty concert hall, listening to him play, I’m not convinced I was his only audience.
I never saw them and I never felt them, but I swear if ever a place was haunted, this old sanatorium was full of ghosts.
From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 11 December 2004 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.