When I was shopping in Blackwells bookshop last weekend, I saw A Body Made of Glass (2024) by Caroline Crampton on a display table and was very intrigued. As the month had rolled over, I had my 15 hours of audiobook listening time renewed on Spotify – and during the week, I spent 9.5 of those hours on Crampton’s excellent book.
A Body Made of Glass is subtitled ‘A History of Hypochondria’ and it’s in a genre that I really appreciate – non-fiction that merges historical research with personal memoir. Crampton is self-professedly a hypochondriac, which is also called (or at least strongly overlaps with) health anxiety. It is recognised in a couple of different variants by modern medical reference books and likely to be taken more seriously by doctors than it would have been a while ago – depending, as Crampton discusses, on your gender, race and class.
So what is hypochondria? It’s one of the questions Crampton poses and explores at length, and there isn’t a simple answer. It may vary between people, but the main things are hypervigilance about symptoms, and extreme anxiety about them. It may manifest as a lot of googling and fixation on possible illnesses, including genuinely developing symptoms that you are concerned about. It often includes medically unexplained symptoms – tests will show the all-clear, but that might not allay the anxiety. The hypochondriac is likely to fear that something has simply been missed,
Crampton’s own medical history can partly explain her anxiety. She had cancer as a teenager, and had to start chemotherapy at a time when most teenagers are concerned with far more trivial matters. As she explains, it means her fear about symptoms is always taken seriously. She gets rushed into tests that others might have to fight hard to get on a waiting list for. But it also means she knows her health is not guaranteed. She knows the truth of the hypochondriac’s fear that this time the slight twinge could be the first signs of something drastic.
But, at the same time, she knows her anxieties are not an accurate representation of reality. She has the brilliant line: “I become an unreliable narrator of my own body.” But how else to judge something as subjective as health? Especially when it comes to the complex, unclear tapestry of the interplay of mental and physical health.
A Body Made of Glass is not exclusively a memoir, though. Often Crampton uses her own experiences to set the tone of a chapter, returning to it when apt – but this is a work of history. The title refers to one form of historical hypochondria – people who believed that their bodies had become glass. King Charles VI of France was one of the most famous sufferers from this delusion. Victims of it would be terrified of touching other people, lest they splinter – or would sit on piles of cushions to avoid breaking. It’s interesting to see how the particular manifestations of hypochondria have changed over times – strongly influenced by the culture. People didn’t have this glass delusion before glass became a common household item. Fast forward centuries – there was a spate of people developing the ‘tic’ symptoms of Tourette’s after TikTok videos about the illness became extremely popular during the pandemic.
Crampton goes right back to Hippocrates, and has done a brilliant amount of research into different theories of health over time, and about how hypochondriacs were treated. To pick a handful – there was the period where the womb was believed to travel around the body, causing mischief. At another time, physicians believed the nose was a microcosm of the body, and treating part of the nose would heal the relevant part of body. She traces the way treatments have been sold and mis-sold over time – from quacks deliberating fooling 17th-century London society to the way in which placebos can be used in genuine medical treatment.
It’s a really brilliant combination. The deep history comes mostly in the first half, interspersed with Crampton’s own experiences. As the book continues, it becomes more philosophical – while tethering discussions about how you diagnose illnesses and how you consider the ‘reality’ of symptoms to the concrete world of the GP’s office. It is a book with a lot of heart and care for people with health anxiety, and a subtle clarion call for them to be respected.
This is one of the reasons I so appreciated A Body Made of Glass. Hypochondriacs – particularly in popular culture – are so often mocked and derided. Think Mr Woodhouse in Emma. His fears about health make him a sweet but tiresome figure of fun. There’s no real consideration about how these anxieties weigh on him. Hypochondriacs are often portrayed as ‘doing it for attention’, or dismissed simply as making things up. I saw so much of myself in what Crampton writes, and it was really encouraging and refreshing to feel seen and understood.
Crampton gives sufferers from health anxiety the dignity and voice they/we deserve. The autobiographical sections were the ones I most liked, but it is overall a well-measured balance of the subjective and objective. It’s an absolutely fascinating, brilliantly written book – and I hope many doctors are among those who read it.