This book benefits from a good writer who chose interesting subjects. There are many more famous hypochondriacs, I am sure, but the ones he selected were a good cross section. As my husband remarked when I told him The Mary Tyler Moore Show was Glenn Gould's favorite TV show, you read books like this to find out that sort of information, the information most people don't consider important enough to report. The interesting thing was that many of these famous hypochondriacs actually did have some form of medical problems, such as Warhol, who died of the one problem he wouldn't acknowledge having. I will look for more by this writer. ( )

Author's writing style is tedious to read. ( )

Brian Dillon's book The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives (published in the UK last year as Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives) tells the stories of nine famous people and the role their hypochondria played in their lives. The subjects range from the historical
(Charles Darwin & Emily Bronte) to the modern (Michael Jackson and Andy Warhol), and Dillon respectfully delves into their medical and psychological histories.

Charles Darwin suffered from terrible flatulence, varying from "slight" to "considerable", "baddish", "sharp" and, on bad days, "excessive". We know this because he kept meticulous records of his bodily state. The pianist Glenn Gould (another flatulence sufferer) also generated "voluminous archives of his symptoms", from blood-pressure statistics to pulse rates.

Hypochondriasis, Brian Dillon tells us in this ingenious and intriguing book, is characterised by an intense scrutiny of the body. We should all listen to our bodies, of
course, but the nine people examined here were hypersensitive, possessing a heightened awareness of having a body and of being embodied in the world.

Dillon accepts that hypochondria is to some extent a chimerical illness, but there are enough similarities and convergences to just about string these disparate lives together, although clearly Daniel Paul Schreber – who experienced "divine miracles" and was convinced that he was turning into a woman – was insane. As Dillon observes, there is something rather impressive about Schreber's delusions and "the prodigious unreality of the mental world he inhabited", although in his classic 1911 case study, Sigmund Freud saw only a paranoiac who
could not admit his homosexuality.

In Tormented Hope Dillon looks beyond the comic stereotype of the hypochondriac to the tragicomic reality. He also makes a strong case for there being a link between "health anxiety" and creativity, following the philosopher Gilles Deleuze's observation that many
great artists have frail health, the idea of the writer or artist being simultaneously the médecin and the malade of a civilisation. Charlotte Brontë's hypochondria, he shows, was displaced on to Lucy Snowe or Jane Eyre, and Proust's was an essential aspect of his art. Dillon is a self-confessed hypochondriac and his conclusion that "the power of imagination . . . is in itself a kind of pathology" has profound implications for literature.

A major theme here is seclusion or, more accurately, reclusion. Darwin was a semi-invalid for much of his adult life, although the nature of his malady remains a mystery. His debility had its advantages: "It meant that he could retreat from the world," says Dillon, "the better to pursue his scientific inquiries." Florence Nightingale's illness was
similarly undiagnosed, but like many Victorian women she probably welcomed a stay in the sickroom: "The invalid fled into an interior world, a kind of secret garden from which she had so far been barred by convention." In her essay "On Being Ill" Virginia Woolf wondered why the sickbed has not been among "the prime themes of literature", and indeed, as Dillon shows us, Marcel Proust's bed was "a well-provisioned craft in which he set sail on a darkened ocean" (a far cry from Heinrich Heine's Matratzengruft or "mattress-grave").

A morbid fear of illness often conceals a fear of death. "A Hypochondriack fancies himself at different times suffering death in all the various ways in which it has been observed," wrote James Boswell, "and thus he dies many times before his death." An exception to this is Alice James (Henry James's sister), who was perversely happy at being told she had breast cancer because her "career as an invalid" had reached its apotheosis.

Dillon quotes from a 17th-century thesis which observes that hypochondriacs can suffer spasms as a result of "sudden Outcry, or the very opening of a Door". When Andy Warhol's silver wig was snatched from his head at a book signing, he complained that "It hurt. Physically." A more extreme example is Gould's response to being patted on the shoulder by a Steinway employee in 1959. He recoiled, muttering: "Don't do that; I don't like to be
touched," and later claimed that this incident had resulted in a problem with his left hand. It was the excuse he needed to withdraw from public performances, and his recording studio, like Proust's bedroom, became a refuge, "a technological cocoon that finally satisfied his
urge to separate himself physically from his public".

The Hypochondriacs is a fascinating book that informs and entertains as it explores hypochondria's effects not only on these subjects' lives but also their art.

Junior Cain (cainbookreviews.blogspot.com) ( )

Tormented Hope, which was on the shortlist for the 2009 Wellcome Trust Book Prize, is a history of hypochondria, as told through the lives of nine noted people who were diagnosed with the disorder in their lifetimes: James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Alice James, Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol. The author uses written personal accounts of these individuals and biographies about them, along with past and current medical literature on hypochondria and the effect of the mind on illness, to elucidate the disease process in the person, and how their illnesses were perceived by themselves and those close to them. The nine people were chosen by the author because they had written extensively about their illnesses.

Although this concept of this book was interesting to me, I did not enjoy it, and stopped reading it about halfway through. I found the discussions tedious and drawn out, and the lives of the people as portrayed by Dillon had little or no interest to me. I think that this book would be much more interesting to readers who have a strong interest in these individuals, rather than someone looking for a medical history of hypochondria. ( )