The more Hans reads about anatomy and biology, the less he is able to consider life apart from its relation to illness and death. In this way he devalues life, seeing it as pointless: as merely a rest stop on the way to corruption, illness, and death. When Hans describes the process by which a disease makes a sick being hyperaware of “its own corporeality,” he seems to embrace Settembrini’s understanding of illness. In that view, illness has no meaning or value in itself: it merely serves to reveal the tragic but inevitable limitations of the physical body.