Davos clinic could take its final breath as haven for allergy sufferers

Davos has been a mecca for men and women looking for Alpine relief from different ailments. Photograph: Alamy

The German novelist Thomas Mann explained it had “no smell, no content material, no humidity” and neighborhood men and women compare it to breathing champagne: the air in Davos has been the important to the Swiss alpine town’s good results for much more than a century. At one,600 metres (five,250 ft) over sea degree, it is said to be drier than anywhere else on the continent and totally free of the property dust mites that can trigger allergies.

But Davos might be about to get rid of its standing as a mecca for those suffering from asthma, neurodermatitis or tuberculosis. Advances in medicine and the sturdy Swiss franc imply health insurers are increasingly reluctant to spend for journeys to the Alps. In 1944, more than 40 sanatoriums dotted the hillsides of Davos, now only two remain.

One of them, the German-run Higher Mountain Clinic in Davos Wolfgang, narrowly prevented bankruptcy in November and has right up until late May 2014 to convince lenders it can cope with practically £28m of debts. “The air on the magic mountain is definitely getting thinner,” mentioned Udo Kaiser, a single of the medical professionals who is fighting to maintain the clinic open.

Davos was put on the map as a health resort in the 1860s, when Dr Alexander Spengler, 39, pioneered a treatment for tuberculosis sufferers that involved cold morning showers, normal drinks of fresh cows’ milk and, crucially, prolonged spells of lying on deckchairs and breathing clean mountain air. Infectious phlegm was spat out and collected in a lidded container produced of blue glass, acknowledged as the Blauer Heinrich or Blue Henry.

By the begin of the 20th century, the Alpine town had been immortalised by Europe’s aristocracy and intelligentsia. In Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain, the principal character visits a buddy in a sanatorium and ends up staying for seven years.

Mann’s novel is much more extensively study these days than the British author Elizabeth MacMorland’s account of her keep in Davos, but it was the latter’s publication in 1878 that triggered a British rush on Davos.

Walking around the town centre now, there are still remnants of what utilised to make up the “English quarter”: an English school, an English church, a Promenade des Anglais, a Hotel D’Angleterre for injured servicemen and a library that employed to residence the greatest assortment of English-language books on the continent. In 1900, a single of the town’s initial luxury sanatoriums was constructed in an arts-and-crafts type, with floral toilet seats imported from the Uk.

Victorian poet John Addington Symonds and writers Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson all sought relief from their ailments in the Alps. Stevenson arrived with severe writers’ block and left in 1882 obtaining finished his classic novel Treasure Island. “A mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an invalid’s weakness make up among them a prison of the most powerful sort,” he wrote in the essay Davos in Winter.

These days, Brits are a lot more most likely to be found skiing on the slopes of close by Klosters. Considering that 1947, medicinal treatment method for TB has created journeys up the mountain pointless – most of the sanatoriums have been converted into hotels. A handful of, such as the Higher Mountain Clinic, managed to successfully reinvent themselves as rehabilitation centres for allergy sufferers: as just lately as 1988, there utilized to be a yr-long wait for beds right here. But this winter, a third of the beds are empty – only a number of guests rest on the sun-facing balconies. “These days, if you have asthma you never go to Davos, you see a pneumologist,” stated Klaus Pleyer, a therapist at the clinic.

Thomas Mann drew inspiration from Davos for his novel, The Magic Mountain. Photograph: A Pfister/AFP/Getty Images

When the management in September unveiled the extent of the clinic’s debt and its plan to close the centre by the end of the year, the region reacted with shock. The chief magistrate of the Graubünden area stated closure would volume to “an economic catastrophe”. Pleyer and Kaiser rallied with a group of traders to consider to keep the location going.

If there is a place for sanatoriums in Davos in the future, they argue, the emphasis ought to be less on healing the sick and far more about creating their lives liveable.

Ute Eberlein, 51, has visited the Substantial Mountain clinic a lot more than forty instances. In Karlsruhe, in which she lives, she has to see a medical professional each day but in Davos, she explained, the climate doubles her lung capability. “As soon as I get here, I can breathe freely,” she said. “One particular factor is clear to me: if the clinic shuts down, I would not survive for a lot longer.”

The management’s rescue prepare involves reducing the number of beds from 350 to 150 and repurposing part of the centre as a house for the elderly, or as “modular age-based mostly living”: like Germany, Switzerland’s population is forecast to age significantly by 2035.

“In the previous, several of the sanatoria manufactured the error of only thinking in terms of existing possibilities,” mentioned Kaiser. “In buy to survive in Davos, you have to search in direction of the potential.”

At the start of the 20th century, several regional men and women had been sceptical about the unwell folks who came to the town: associating the title Davos with illness hardly seemed like a great way to entice tourists. But Peter Flury, a local doctor who runs a health care history museum, explained the sanatoriums would be missed. “Davos has always essential the clinics, even it isn’t going to like to admit that,” he explained.

Davos clinic could take its final breath as haven for allergy sufferers