The Swiss Sanatorium

941 Words2 Pages

I. Summary

“[The] Swiss Sanatorium Society is a fabrication, and its very foundations have compromised its goodness,” Linda De Roche argues in her article explaining the false ideas behind the sanatoriums that the character Nicole Diver, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night” and Zelda Sayre, Fitzgerald’s wife, experienced during their rehabilitation (De Roche 50). The article makes connections to the false concepts that the public received about the mentioned sanatoriums in Switzerland. Sanatoriums, as researched by De Roche, created an atmosphere for mentally ill patients without subjecting them to mental asylums, which acquired a terrible reputation of pain and treatments that resembled torture. As a result, technological advances produced the “extension of the railway” and a tide of “health tourists” that flooded Switzerland, which “primed [the country] to become the world’s sanatorium” (De Roche 52). The author explains that Switzerland, aided by the industrial age, becomes an ideal residence for people who sought a place that epitomized a healthy atmosphere. People from all over the world may enjoy the health benefits that the Swiss sanatoriums provided; however, only a small group of people could afford these health clinics.

De Roche uses the history of the Swiss sanatorium to explain how it became a tool of financial gain for physicians and a disillusioned haven for patients as illustrated in “Tender Is the Night.” Between the end of the ninetieth and beginning of the twentieth centuries Switzerland experiences two major “cultural developments: the rise of tourism and advances in psychiatry” which aid in the ushering of many tourists seeking a place that promised health, safety, and above all...

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...ntempt for freethinking (holding Nicole mentally hostage) and abuses the trust of the public; Dick Diver and Nicole Diver are the examples used to explore the illusion of the Swiss sanatorium, and how they hinder rather than help, mental healing.

III. Thesis

De Roche explains how sanatoriums in Switzerland became a financial holding for doctors and a mental purgatory for patients; to complete the connection from history to “Tender Is the Night” De Roche should have added the description of Nicole Diver’s treatment and the importance of her family money during her stay at the sanatorium in Zurich.

Work Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender Is the Night. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933. Print.

Blazek, William, and Laura Rattray. Twenty-First Readings of 'Tender Is the Night'.

Liverpool:Liverpool University Press, 2007. 50-66. eBook.

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