A Body Made of Glass

Description

A Body Made of Glass
by Caroline Crampton

ISBN: 9780063273900
Hardcover, new

Brief Description:
Part cultural history, part literary criticism, and part memoir, A Body
Made of Glass is a definitive biography of hypochondria. Caroline
Crampton’s life was upended at the age of seventeen, when she was diagnosed
with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a relatively rare blood cancer. After years of
invasive treatment, she was finally given the all clear. But being cured of
the cancer didn’t mean she now felt well. Instead, the fear lingered, and
she found herself always on the alert, braced for signs that the illness
had reemerged. Now, in A Body Made of Glass, Crampton has drawn from her
own experiences with health anxiety to write a revelatory exploration of
hypochondria–a condition that, though often suffered silently, is
widespread and rising. She deftly weaves together history, memoir, and
literary criticism to make sense of this invisible and undercovered
sickness. From the earliest medical case of Hippocrates to the literary
accounts of sufferers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust to the modern
perils of internet self-diagnosis, Crampton unspools this topic to reveal
the far-reaching impact of health anxiety on our physical, mental, and
emotional health. At its heart, Crampton explains, hypochondria is a
yearning for knowledge. It is a never-ending attempt to replace the
edgeless terror of uncertainty with the comforting solidity of a definitive
explanation. Through intimate personal stories and compelling cultural
perspective, A Body Made of Glass brings this uniquely ephemeral condition
into much-needed focus for the first time.