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The Case for Hypochondria
Caroline Crampton’s new book studies the fuzzy boundaries between sickness and health.
A burgeoning genre of literary nonfiction, from Scocca’s essay to Porochista Khakpour’s Sick to Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom, documents and validates illnesses that do not always show up in lab tests, that present with unexplained pain, or that affect multiple body systems—conditions such as endometriosis, chronic fatigue, or long Covid. It began as a mysterious ailment of the abdomen at a time when medicine understood the body as a grid of discrete anatomical regions, two of which, corresponding to the liver and the spleen, were called “the hypochondrium.” Then it was thought to be an illness caused by an imbalance in the four “humors,” viscous the proportions of which influenced everything from a person’s temperament to their predilection for certain aches and pains. Hypochondria shifts shape, from the French King Charles VI, who in the fourteenth century believed himself made entirely of glass, to John Donne, whose poetry dwelled on the possibility that illness “demolishes all,” to Molière, who likely had undiagnosed tuberculosis and often ridiculed in his comedies the doctors who failed to cure him.
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