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!)
Monitored by smartphones at the very least — some days I invite both a Garmin watch and an Oura ring to join in the fun — those in the overdeveloped world now can choose to know more about our homeostatic status than anytime in human history.
In doctors’ offices, too, more can be scanned and tested and analyzed than ever before, and the results cross-referenced with whatever our personal devices are gathering. We are no longer “opaque meat sacks,” as Crampton puts it (echoing “Futurama”), but accessible data centers: our inner workings revealed as if our very skin were a window.
But is such knowledge powerful or paralyzing? “If we can see that all is well, or if we can pinpoint the exact nature of what is wrong, perhaps our bigger fears will disappear,” Crampton writes. “And yet, with this transparency comes an awareness of the million minute things that need to function well for us to be healthy and the ease with which any of them could fail.”
Crampton, who podcasts about detective fiction and whose previous book was a deep dive into the Thames, has collected hypochondriacs from across centuries and disciplines. You can imagine them sitting down to dinner together in one of those huge paintings that hang at the Met, fretting that the soup course might make them bilious.
Suspected of exaggerating his asthma, Proust stopped going outside. John Donne, who suffered terrible loss of family to illness, wrote in “An Anatomy of the World”:
There is no health; physicians say that we
At best enjoy but a neutrality.
And can there be worse sickness than to know
That we are never well, nor can be so.
Let’s seat him next to George Costanza, who thinks he’s having a heart attack after eating a salad.
To learn about the specific hypochondria of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennessee Williams, Howard Hughes and Glenn Gould, you’ll have to go a-Googling; Crampton merely mentions them.
Better that, maybe, than Googling your symptoms — bane for the physicians who once considered themselves authority figures and now have to reassure patients who’ve Done Their Own Research; bottomless pit of worry for many citizens, some of whom become downright “cyberchondriacs,” finding the worst interpretation of every twinge. “I whisper my problem into it,” Crampton writes of the internet, “and it is returned to me as an all-consuming shout.”
“A Body Made of Glass” oscillates between lengthy paragraphs of scholarship and periods of self-scrutiny, including therapy. One can be technically “free” of cancer, Crampton underscores, yet perpetually haunted; eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (E.M.D.R.) offers a way to exorcise the emotions suppressed when she got the bad news.
The book unfolds more in these clinicians’ chambers and hushed libraries than in the clamorous public square. The author is glancing on the contested malady of long Covid and the astronomical rise in A.D.H.D. diagnoses, but gazes mesmerized at 21st-century “wellness” rites and the surprising endurance of quacks and kooks.
Following her thought process is sort of a magical, trippy experience, with a whiff of Alice in Wonderland nibbling the magic mushroom. Even when terrible tumors are suspected, they can have a fairy-tale-like quality, “poisonous yet invisible roses creeping through my flesh to bind my life with their thorny tangles.”
Stare at your crazy nails, Crampton subtextually urges. Ponder your pores. We’re all so weird and wonderful in ways that can’t be quantified.
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