Caroline Crampton shares her own worries in “A Body Made of Glass,” a history of hypochondria that wonders whether newfangled technology drives us crazier.
A BODY MADE OF GLASS: A Cultural History of Hypochondria, by Caroline Crampton
British national identity is built on the stiff upper lip, but the author Caroline Crampton, who lives in Merseyside, has allowed hers to quaver and curl, and it’s a relief.
At 17, Crampton was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Actually, when the doctor announced his findings, she did react with a stiff upper lip: stoic in the way that adolescents, who are still part children, can be before they are able to make sense of a situation. It was her mother who — quite understandably — fainted and slid off the chair.
Crampton endured multiple courses of chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant and painful egg retrieval to maximize chances of preserving her fertility. Also understandably, she became in young adulthood anxious and vigilant about lumps, hair loss and other signs of bodily trouble.
She is straightforward about identifying as a hypochondriac, although she understands that in modern times people like her are often stigmatized or disbelieved, as she writes in “A Body Made of Glass,” a beguiling new book about the condition, both individual and zeitgeisty.
She seeks to reclaim the term, palpate its various meanings over time and show how porous the line between mental and physical health has always been. This occasions reacquaintance with humors, vapors, pallor and other archaic but picturesque medical concepts.
“A Body Made of Glass” is named for a fascinating delusion of feeling “fragile, brittle and extremely smashable” that afflicted King Charles VI of France and the hero of a 1613 novella by Cervantes, and that, in Crampton’s framing, serves as a metaphor for humanity’s current predicament — maximum optimization, yet a lingering sense of affliction. (Before people started believing they were made of glass, incidentally, they fretted they might be made of pottery. Make mine Meissen!)