In the 14th century, King Charles VI of France suffered from a curious, but by no means original, delusion. He believed his body was made entirely of glass. A relatively new material, both fragile and transparent, glass captures the hypochondriac’s acutest fear – brittle vulnerability – with their greatest desire: visceral omniscience. This human longing to peer inside our “meaty vessel” was answered in the 20th century by medical technologies, including blood testing, microscopy and imaging, which became widely available. Rather than soothe the hypochondriacal itch, however, this intimate access – along with Google’s democratisation of medical knowledge – has fuelled health anxiety to new heights.
Caroline Crampton describes herself as a hypochondriac, but one with impostor syndrome because she previously had a severe “real” illness. She thinks back to the naivety of her 17-year-old self, unaware of “the tennis ball-sized lump” above her left collarbone that was “already big enough to cast its own shadow”. Life-threatening disease was lurking in plain sight, painfully obvious to see in old photos. More than a decade after radiotherapy, chemo, a stem cell transplant, egg retrieval and a successfully managed recurrence of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Crampton now sees tumours everywhere. The hypochondriacal cancer survivor is, she suggests, tragicomic. A brush with malignancy is supposed to remind you what really matters; instead, Crampton feels trapped in the limbo between the “binaries of sickness and health”, poking at her body in the mirror.
