From The Wall Street Journal:
The first time it happened, Caroline Crampton was on a bus. Rain lashed the windows as the breath of weary commuters fogged the glass. The hum of casual conversation drifted along the aisle, mixed with fragments of phone calls and the grinding of tires. Then, without warning, it all stopped. Ms. Crampton had gone suddenly, inexplicably deaf, except for a high-pitched whine. Seconds later, her vision dissolved “into a prismatic sphere of light.” The bus and its occupants, the windows and fog, were all subsumed by a “disco ball turned inside out.” Effectively blind and deaf, she stumbled off the bus. And then, almost as suddenly as it began, the attack was over. The anxiety, however, had only just begun—along with many, many medical tests.
“I am in the belly of the machine and it is singing,” writes Ms. Crampton in “A Body Made of Glass.” A self-proclaimed treatment seeker, she recalls her episode on the bus as she is being scanned inside an MRI machine. Most of us have come to rely on science to some degree or other, but Ms. Crampton, who wrote “The Way to the Sea” (2019), describes herself as “a supplicant” before technology, “begging it for knowledge,” asking it to turn her transparent through the miracle of medicine and magnets.
The MRI transforms her from “a lump of meat on a slab” into detailed images and structured data. “For fractions of seconds” she explains, her body becomes as glass. She expects to be found ill—she is always half convinced that she is dying of a yet-undiagnosed disease—but like so many times before, even the MRI comes up empty. There’s simply nothing to see. Her strange symptoms have no detectable source, and in medicine both modern and historic, “illness without cause” is summarily dismissed as hypochondria.
From the Greek hupo, meaning under, and khondros, meaning the sternum, “hypochondria” once denoted ailments of the torso before evolving in the 15th century into its current connotation. In effect, “hypochondria” is a body-word used to describe a mind-illness, “at once visceral and figurative, just like the condition that it describes.” Part memoir, part medical history, “A Body Made of Glass” provides an intimate, honest, willingly vulnerable exploration into a very sticky question: When it comes to health and sickness, what is real and what is imaginary? More importantly, who decides?
Ms. Crampton’s troubled relationship with illness began at the age of 17, when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After months of treatment, she was told she was free of the cancer, only to have it return by the time she was 18. The experience left her, understandably, skeptical of the notion of a cure. With extraordinary candor, she walks us through her ever-present fear: Isn’t the cancer still there, lurking in her blood and tissue? Against a disease that’s often invisible until it’s too late, hypervigilance doesn’t seem foolish. And yet, she writes, “it feels at times like having cancer for real was the training I went through so that I could have a dozen other illnesses in my imagination.”
In prose that brings forth the most visceral aspects of hypochondriac dread—the constant sensation of feeling prodded and poked, the imagined spiral into debility and death—Ms. Crampton re-creates the sensation of being alien to an ungovernable body. She suspects there is nothing to find, that the screaming panic will subside, that she’ll return to her office chair and get back to work. But she doubts. And as her historiography makes plain, she and others like her may have good reason.
The story of hypochondria—a proper fear of illness and injury that runs amok and out of proportion—begins in ancient Egypt and Babylon but, like so many of our evolutionary quirks, goes back further still. “Illness is a story we tell about ourselves,” Ms. Crampton explains. Each of us looks for underlying patterns in our health as a means of “staving off the yawning blackness of the unknown.” Notable figures—John Donne, Howard Hughes, James Madison, Blaise Pascal, Marcel Proust, Tennessee Williams—struggled with hypochondriasis, as did the French king Charles VI. Gripped by mania during a military campaign, he became the first documented case of someone who believed his body was made of glass and would “shatter on contact.”
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)