The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives Book

Charlotte Brontë found in her illnesses, real and imagined, an escape from familial and social duties, and the perfect conditions for writing. The German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber believed his body was being colonized and transformed at the hands of God and doctors alike. Andy Warhol was terrified by disease and by the idea of disease. Glenn Gould claimed a friendly pat on his shoulder had destroyed his ability to play piano. And we all know someone who has trawled the Internet in solitude, seeking to pinpoint the source of his or her fantastical symptoms.

The Hypochondriacs is a book about fear and hope, illness and imagination, despair and creativity. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And, in an intimate investigation of those lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Through witty, entertaining, and often moving examinations of the lives of these eminent hypochondriacs—James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Alice James, Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould, and Andy Warhol—Brian Dillon brilliantly unravels the tortuous connections between real and imagined illness, irrational fear and rational concern, the mind’s aches and the body’s ideas.

Kirkus Reviews

The story of hypochondria through the lens of a few of its famous sufferers. Though the concept has evolved over the centuries, its victims have continued to suffer horribly and to make enormous demands on others. The hypochondrium, the area of the abdomen housing the liver, gall bladder and other organs, was initially conceived as the seat of human melancholy and, in that quaint term, the vapors. As Cabinet magazine U.K. editor Dillon (In the Dark Room: A Journey in Memory, 2005) demonstrates, it is not difficult to see how the term has transformed to mean what it has today. He playfully defines hypochondriacs as "other people," then offers a more generic definition: persons who suspect that diseases-or mental illness-have moved in permanently. He examines the cases of nine cultural celebrities from more than two centuries, including Boswell, Darwin, Proust and Warhol. In each of the essays he covers much of the same ground, including the person's family history, symptoms, treatments (from physicians and others), death and, finally, the significance. The author includes excerpts from letters, diaries and other biographies and books by physicians, psychologists and quacks from all relevant periods. He also identifies a problem inherent in his analysis: Because medical knowledge and terminology have changed dramatically, it's very difficult to tell exactly what, if anything, was ailing Charlotte Bronte, Darwin, Alice James and others. Nonetheless, he dives into their stories and turns up some intriguing facts and trends, though he addresses diet insufficiently-with the exception of Proust and Andy Warhol, both eccentric eaters. The cumulative effect of these stories is a surpassingsadness-poor Glenn Gould and others, retreating from a world in which they could not adequately function. Sturdy research and subtle analysis of these extreme cases produce some startling insights into human suffering. Agent: Peter Straus/Rogers, Coleridge & White