Caroline Crampton on the History of Hypochondria
Friday 26th April
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7.10pm
7.30pm
Caroline Crampton - celebrated author of The Way to the Sea: The Forgotten Histories of the Thames Estuary - comes to Edinburgh this April to present her latest book, A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria. A fascinating and revelatory cultural history of hypochondria, from Hippocrates to wellness influencers - for those who enjoyed our events with Siddhartha Mukherjee and Gavin Francis.
This will be an insightful evening, giving us the opportunity to discuss an elusive condition affecting ~6% of the UK population.
A Body Made of Glass
An ache, a pain, a mysterious lump, a strange sensation in some part of your body, the feeling that something is not right. The fear that something is, in fact, very wrong. These could be symptoms of illness. But they could also be the symptoms of hypochondria - an enigmatic condition that might be physiological or psychological or both.
In this landmark book, Caroline Crampton tells the story of hypochondria, beginning in the age of Hippocrates and taking us right through to the wellness industry today. Along the way, we encounter successive generations of doctors positing new theories, as well as quacks selling spurious cure-alls to the desperate. And we meet those who have suffered with conditions both real and imagined, including Moliere, Darwin, Woolf, Freud, Larkin, and Proust whose symptoms and sensitivities gradually narrowed his life to the space of his cork-lined bedroom.
Crampton also examines the gendered nature of the medical response, the financial and social factors at play, and the ways in which modern technology simultaneously feeds our fears and holds out the promise of relief. Drawing on Crampton's own experience of surviving a life-threatening disease only to find herself beset by almost constant anxiety about her health, A Body Made of Glass explores part of the landscape of illness that most memoirs don't reach: the territory beyond survival or cure, where body and mind seem locked in a strange and exhausting kind of dance.
About Caroline Crampton
Caroline Crampton is an author and podcaster who writes about the world and how we live in it. She worked in journalism at publications like the New Statesman and The Times before focusing on literary non-fiction. Her first book, The Way to the Sea: The Forgotten Histories of the Thames Estuary (Granta, 2019), was described by critics "as elegant and sinuous as the river" and "wise, fascinating and informative". Her new book is A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria (Granta, 2024). Her award-winning podcast about golden age detective fiction, Shedunnit, is distributed by BBC Sounds.