Memoir, cultural history and bleak humour characterise this brilliant personal exploration of health anxiety
aroline Crampton was 17 and midway through her A-levels when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a rare form of blood cancer. When the diagnosis was delivered in the consultant’s office, her mother fainted, quietly sliding off her chair and on to the floor. After months of gruelling treatment, Crampton was given the all-clear and went to university as planned. But in her first year, she found a lump on her neck that turned out to be a tumour.
Born out of bruising experience, Crampton’s book is a biographical account of hypochondria – generally defined as excessive worry about serious illness – taking in those who have endured, researched, treated and profited from it. Blending memoir and cultural history, it is lucid, broad in scope, full of nuanced reflection and digs deep into concepts of rationality, language, trauma, the brain v the body, class, gender and the inequity of health services.
There is, of course, a place for health anxiety as an entirely rational response to one’s environment. For early humankind, it was part of “the complex web of adaptations and traits” that enabled our survival. While the immune system offered a wall of protection to early humans, so did the brain, by identifying danger in the form of disease or rotting food, giving them the best possible chance of evading illness.
It will surprise precisely no one to learn the gendered nature of medical treatment and assumed cases of hypochondria. The ancient Greeks believed that the uterus moved around the body – Plato famously described it as “the animal within” – and was the source of all manner of maladies.
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