Sick with worry?: A look at the arc of hypochondria

In the late Middle Ages, a strange fear swept parts of Europe. It’s an arc Caroline Crampton traces in her new book, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria. The English naturalist Charles Darwin, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, French novelist Marcel Proust and British poet John Donne all left behind traces of intense, unrelenting and unfounded concerns over their health. Back to the illustrious hypochondriacs, Crampton explores how the British novelist Jane Austen created some of the most dramatic such sufferers of the literary world, perhaps inspired by her mother, Cassandra Leigh Austen. “And yet, with this transparency comes an awareness of the million minute things that need to function well for us to be healthy and the ease with which any of them could fail.” Or, as Donne put it, in An Anatomy of the World : “There is no health; physicians say that we At best enjoy but a neutrality.