There’s nothing shameful about hypochondria

The hypochondriac is the butt of jokes. Even his butt is the butt of jokes. A story doing the  rounds in the 16th and 17th centuries concerned a Parisian glassmaker who, believing himself to be also made of glass, fastened a cushion to his buttocks in case they broke when he sat down. His anxiety was mocked by a character in a play called Lingua, Or the Combat of the Tongue: ‘I am a Urinal, I dare not stirre,/ For fear of cracking in the Bottome.’

The aim of A Body Made of Glass is to take hypochondria, or ‘illness anxiety disorder’, seriously. But in a moment of levity, Caroline Crampton compares laughing about hypochondria to laughing about farts being made visible ‘like soap bubbles in the air’. The laughter is the same, she says, because society demands that both our personal wind and what Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy called the ‘splenetic hypochondriacal wind’, should be hidden away. Crampton, herself a hypochondriac, at first worried about the windiness of these pages; but ‘now I just think: I’m glad you don’t know what it is like’.

It was not unusual for maniacs, in the days before glass become commonplace, to think they were made of the same strange substance. Some ‘glass people’, as Crampton calls them, assumed the form of an object such as an oil lamp, while others, like the French King Charles VI, believed that their flesh would similarly shatter on contact. To prevent this from happening, Charles moved with caution and had his clothing reinforced with iron rods. The hero of Cervantes’s novel The Glass Graduate, who buried himself in straw when he went to sleep as though being packed away for a journey, described it as ‘the strangest madness that was ever heard of among the many kinds by which humanity has been assailed’.