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

The paper examines Thomas Mann's novel, The Magic mountain, to show how ima ginative literature can enhance our understanding of health in place. The s tory centers on the experiences of flans 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 tran sitions. Lessons for health geography an drawn from analysis of the three t hemes. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.