The Brooklyn Rail

Toward the end of her hybrid memoir and history of hypochondria, A Body Made of Glass, Caroline Crampton describes the condition as “an enormous pendulum.” The image represents hypochondria’s swing over the centuries from a solely bodily condition to a mind-body issue to a purely mental state.

A highlights reel of the history of hypochondria might go like this: the first literary description of something like hypochondria appeared during the Babylonian Empire and included symptoms, such as headache and stomach pain, that have been associated with the condition ever since. The term “hypochondria” itself was first used in the Greek Hippocratic Corpus and referred to a specific part of the body somewhere around the abdomen. Early modern writers like John Donne and Robert Burton wrote of their own health worries and of the many symptoms of the condition then described as “melancholy,” “with its shape-shifting symptoms and vain fixation on the fragility of the self.”

Crampton’s own experiences with hypochondria began when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma at seventeen. Even after her cancer was treated successfully, Crampton found that she was hypervigilant about any potential threats to her health. And even though (sometimes because) her status as a cancer survivor and her residence in the UK granted her relatively easy access to doctors and testing to examine those potential threats, the worry never lessened.

As I read A Body Made of Glass—the title is drawn from medieval stories of individuals who believed their limbs or organs had turned to glass—I found myself resisting the term “hypochondria.” Wasn’t hypochondria inherently unreasonable, and wasn’t it thoroughly reasonable for someone like Crampton, or anyone else who has dealt with a significant medical issue, to experience anxiety about their health? (Researchers have found that fear of cancer recurrence, in particular, is common among survivors.) Crampton asks herself the same questions, concluding that while her medical history might be the seed of some of her anxiety, it “has long since swelled into something all of its own.” Where is the line between rational, understandable worry about one’s health and hypochondria? Does that line shift depending on someone’s medical history or whether they’re less likely—as women and people of color are, for example—to be taken seriously in a doctor’s office? Or does health worry only become rational in retrospect, if the anxiety is followed by a diagnosis? There are no firm answers, but Crampton dissects each of these questions with care and nuance.

Crampton likes the word “hypochondria” for the connection it provides to fellow medically anxious individuals throughout history, even if terms like “health anxiety” or the “worried well” are more prevalent and officially recognized now. At the same time, Crampton doesn’t treat hypochondria only with seriousness: she is well aware of hypochondria as a source of humor, and acknowledges the (sometimes dark) comedy of her own experiences seeking medical care in anxious moments.

Though the book is marketed as a hybrid memoir and Crampton’s story serves as an anchor, her experiences make up a fairly small proportion of A Body Made of Glass. The book ranges comprehensively not only through the history of hypochondria, but also through hypochondria’s appearances in books and culture, from early modern literature to Woody Allen films to Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennet (and Austen’s own mother). I found myself bringing up the book to nearly everyone I spoke to during the time I was reading it, both because I found it fascinating and because it contained some element I felt would appeal to each person’s specific interests.

I also wished I could hand out copies of some of the final pages, which left me vowing never to google a symptom or health concern again. The internet, Crampton writes, “is the most expansive and spacious playground that hypochondria has ever had” because of the access it offers to everything from medical research to patient stories to health disinformation. And the structures of the search engines we use, Crampton explains, fuel what has come to be known as “cyberchondria.” If we click on pages about more serious health conditions after searching a particular symptom, the search engine gives more weight to those kinds of pages going forward. TikTok can send us down similar paths based on which videos catch our attention, giving the impression that certain symptoms could only be due to a particular illness or reinforcing incorrect health information. As Crampton puts it: “The internet acts like a megaphone for the hypochondriac; I whisper my problem into it, and it is returned to me as an all-consuming shout.”

There aren’t many hypochondria memoirs; perhaps that scarcity is one reason why A Body Made of Glass kept reminding me, instead, of illness narratives. Like those mystified by the symptoms of an illness and struggling to find a diagnosis, the hypochondriacs Crampton describes face skepticism, a seemingly endless run of medical appointments, and a profusion of online rabbit holes that may or may not be helpful. Both conditions can be disorienting, bewildering, exhausting; both are exercises in coping with uncertainty. The person with chronic illness eventually finds at least a partial answer. The hypochondriac finds that there is no answer—and perhaps is left to feel silly for asking the question.