The
silent sister, or die stumme
Schwester, is a term in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain for a clinical
thermometer
without visible markings "to be used by those who wanted to cheat."
Hans Castorp, the main character of the novel, first learns of the
device from Herr Settembrini, a patient of the sanatorium for the
tubercular that Hans is visiting:
... I, too, have seen some marvelous
cases of acclimatization. There was Fraulein Kneifer just last year, Ottilie
Kneifer, ... She was here for about a year and a half, and became so splendidly
accustomed to life up here that once she had been completely restored to health
-- and that does happen, people do get well up here sometimes -- she refused to
leave on any account. She fervently begged the director to be allowed to stay--
she simply could not, would not return home. This was home to her, this was where
she was happy. But there was such a press of people wanting to get in, and they
needed her room. Her pleas proved in vain, and they insisted that they would
have to dismiss her as healed. Ottilie came down with a high fever, let her
chart just shoot up with a vengeance. Except they found her out--by
substituting a 'silent sister' for her usual thermometer. You don't yet know
what that is--it's a thermometer without any markings, and the doctor checks it
by laying a scale up against it and draws the chart himself. Ottilie, sir, had
a temperature of ninety-eight point four. Ottilie had no fever.
On
its own, an unmarked thermometer is
a ridiculous image: a measureless tool of measurement. Yet in the
social
climate of the sanatorium it serves an important purpose and becomes a
symbol
for the strange, insular culture that has developed amongst the
patients. There's a poem by Lord Byron called Prisoner of Chillon
this aspect of The Magic Mountain reminds me of. After a time, the
prisoner becomes so used to his
captivity he ceases to desire to be rid of it.
With spiders I had friendship made
And watch'd them in their sullen trade,
Had seen the mice by moonlight play,
And why should I feel less than they?
We were all inmates of one place,
And I, the monarch of each race,
Had power to kill-yet, strange to tell!
In quiet we had learn'd to dwell;
My very chains and I grew friends,
So much a long communion tends
To make us what we are:-even I
Regain'd my freedom with a sigh.
It's
the same story in Magic Mountain; the patients sometimes become so
accustomed to taking the cure that whether or not they are recovering
becomes a
superfluous detail.
The silent sister also illustrates the dark sense of humor shared by the patients, when, during
the Walpurgis-Night celebrations, Frau Iltis styles her masquerade costume
after the thermometer and is met with mirthful applause:
... dressed as a nurse; but her black uniform
was marked off from head to foot by short white strips close under each other,
with a longer one at regular intervals, like degrees on a thermometer. She had
one finger laid to her pallid lips, and in her other hand a fever chart … What
applause there was!
The
silent sister, too, is an important
symbol in the novel of the fluidity of time. Just as the thermometers
sometimes lose their graduations atop the Zauberberg, so too are
conventional ways of measuring time lost. When Hans Castorp tells
the patients he intends to visit for only three weeks, he’s met with
laughter. As
Herr Settembrini says:
O dio! Three weeks! Do you hear,
Lieutenant? Does it sound to you impertinent to hear a person say: 'I am
stopping for three weeks and then I am going away again'? We up here are not
acquainted with such an unit of time as the week - if I may be permitted to
instruct you, my dear sir. Our smallest unit is the month.
Silent sisters do seem to have existed outside of The Magic
Mountain, though information about them is scarce. Christian Virchow, in Medizinhistorisches um den ,Zauberberg', references Mann's silent sister and notes that
a thermometer of that type had been presented by a Dr Mercier in 1896 to
allow patients to take their own temperatures unmonitored, but in a parenthetical aside mentions he's been
unable to discover whether or not the silent sister was still in use in
1912 in the Waldsanatorium in Davos the novel's setting is based on.1 However, as Mann's wife was a patient of the sanatorium for four
months, where he visited her, he may have incorporated the
detail on good authority.
1. "(Ob die "stumme Schwester" im Jahre 1912 in
Davos noch im Gebrauch war, habe ich nicht eruieren können.)" Christian
Virchow, Medizinhistorisches um den "Zauberberg": "Das gläserne
Angebinde" und ein pneumologisches Nachspiel, Gastvortrag an der
Universität Augsburg, am 22. Juni, 1992