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