Studies in Hypochondria (360G-Wellcome-218046_Z_19_Z)

"Studies in Hypochondria" is an interdisciplinary, medical humanities project that charts changing conceptualisations of the relationship between health and illness through a literary and cultural history of the figure who troubles our ability to make that distinction: the hypochondriac. By reading medical and historical texts, I show how in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hypochondria lost its longstanding association with melancholy and hysteria, and took on its modern meaning as an excessive fear that one is suffering from disease. At this time the hypochondriac became the object of ridicule and scorn. I historicize these cultural shifts, arguing that, in its modern form, hypochondria arose in the late Victorian period as an anxious response to increased knowledge of disease and its diverse aetiologies. I argue that hypochondriacal doubt is constructed by the very medical discourses that it calls into question. Furthermore, through a series of literary "case studies" I examine hypochondria’s complex relationship with literature. By turning to three celebrated and self-described hypochondriac writers, I show how hypochondria has repeatedly been mobilized by artists and writers as a means of testing, often sceptically, the certainties of Enlightenment rationality and medicine.