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Hans Castorp's initial reaction is pained confusion: instead of returning to the Magic Mountain alone, Clawdia Chauchat has come back to the sanatorium in the company of Pieter Peeperkorn, an elderly colonial Dutchman who traded coffee on Java. Hofrat Behrens gives Hans what is initially the somewhat wel- come news that his rival "hasn't come up here for fun" (549). On the contrary, Peeperkorn suffers from a serious disease which the doctor diagnoses as "tropi- cal fever, malignant, intermittent, you know; protracted, obstinate" [Tropen- fieber ... Wechselfieber, verstehen Sie, verschleppt, hartnäckig] (ibid.).1
While at this early point it is not quite clear what Hans Castorp could possibly "understand" [verstehen Sié\ about his disease, it soon emerges that Peeperkorn's crude vitalism is to play a crucial role in Castorp's personal development and the novel's world of ideas in general. Literary scholars have, therefore, analysed in great detail the various philosophical and mytho-religious allusions to Nietzsche, Wagner, Christ and Dionysus crystallized in the figure of Peeperkorn. Scarce at- tention, however, has been given to the Dutchman's exotic disease for which Behrens, interestingly enough, has arrived at two different names: Tropenfieber and Wechselfieber. In my reflections on the interaction of medical knowledge and literary imagination in Mann's portrayal of Peeperkorn's disease, I would like to address a seemingly pedantic diagnostic question and try to show its relevance for another, more 'literary' one: First, what kind of fever does Peeperkorn ac- tually suffer from? And second, why?
I.
The first question seems easy enough to answer, not only because Thomas Mann occasionally used the term "malaria" in reference to Peeperkorn, but also be- cause his representation of Peeperkorn's symptoms closely follows contempor- ary descriptions of the disease in encyclopaedias and medical textbooks.2 This applies to Peeperkorn's inflamed spleen, his chapped lips and unquenchable thirst and, most notably, to his regularly recurring attacks of fever: about every fourth day the "quartan fever" takes the aged colonist "first with a chill, then with a fever \Gliihe>i\, then with a mighty sweat" (555).3 From a medical perspec- tive two of Peeperkorn's most significant characteristics - his stuttering and his fear of impotence - may also be regarded as symptoms of his illness. According to Bernhard Nocht and Martin Mayer's 1918 study Die...