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 …
Hypochondriacs have a poor reputation. “On a per-novel basis,” writes Caroline Crampton in her history of hypochondria, A Body Made of Glass, “she surely outpaces any other writer in the English language” when it comes to such characters. Like most books labeled “cultural history,” A Body Made of Glass is drawn more from archival and textual sources than from firsthand …
