SOURCE: Otis, Laura. “The Tigers of Wrath: Mann's Death in Venice as Myth and Medicine.” In Teaching Literature and Medicine, edited by Anne Hunsaker Hawkins and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, pp. 243-51. New York: Modern Language Association, 2000.

In the following essay, Otis discusses similarities between Death in Venice and Robert Koch's 1884 articles on germ theory.

While reading Robert Koch's articles on germ theory, I made a startling discovery. In 1884, Koch described the Ganges delta, the area he envisioned as the origin of cholera, as follows: “Luxuriant vegetation and abundant animal life have arisen in this uninhabited area. This area is shunned by humans, not only because of floods and tigers, but principally because of the pernicious fever that befalls everyone who remains there even for a short time” (166). The passage seemed familiar to me, and, turning to Death in Venice (1911), I compared Thomas Mann's description with Koch's: “His desire...