Hypochondriaque lecteur - mon semblable

 

The temperature of the Golden Mean is 98.6 F.

Or is it 97.5F?  Surveys differ. The point, however, is that the warmth of my body and the warmth of your body, when healthy, dips lower or higher only by a decimal point or so. Our warmths are a community, and even a bond between us. I don’t have to touch you to know this.

“You are going to make yourself sick.” This is a common enough parental warning. My Grandfather used to worry about wearing a sweater or coat inside, because, according to his calculations – or some advice handed down from some shadowy figure in his background, back in the 1910s – the protection against the cold aided by these vestments was nullified if they were worn in the heated inside environment. I still half believe this is true, though I have never googled it for a fact. To make yourself sick is an interesting, and multiply implicating phrase – it is perhaps our entrance into neurosis.

Sickness, we like to think, is exterior – it is the invading germ, or some dire environmental circumstance. The self, a captain as helpless as the tied down Ulysses, passing by the sirens, can’t, in one view,  of itself make the body sick. Long before Freud, however, this was a disputed issue. In his introduction to his book on various hypochondriacs, Brian Dillon writes:

The history of hypochondria – the history, that is, of what was meant by the word and what we mean by it today – is the history, then, of a “real” disease which has lost most of its symptoms over the course of several centuries, and also of a prodigious variety of imaginary disease that has come to be recognized once more, in our century, as a pathology in itself, a disorder with identifiable symptoms and some possible cures. The chronology is confusing, the vocabulary ambiguous and palimpsestic, the illness at times as chimerical as the horrors imagined by its victims. But the stakes are clear: to think about hypochondria is to think about the nature of sickness in a fundamental sense, to ask what can legitimately be called a disease and what cannot….”

Dillon’s nine portraits of hypchondriacs are mainly English or America – Marcel Proust and Daniel Paul Schreber being the exceptions – and that makes some sense. George Cheyne, the late seventeenth century physician most famous for advocating vegetarianism, wrote a book entitled the English Malady:  or a treatise of Nervous diseases of all Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distempers, etc. The French associated Spleen with the English character until the twentieth century – Jules Verne’s Phileus Fogg is of the type, a wager away from boredom. Boredom: another typical English malady. The idea was, vaguely, that given a foggy climate and the diet of the wealthy English bourgeoisie, tending to fats and alcohol, hypochondria was a result consistent with what the physician would consider natural history:  

“What we call Nervous Distempers, were certainly, in some small Degree, known and observ'd by the Greek , Roman , and Arabian Physicians, tho' not such a Number of them as now, nor with so high Symptoms, so as to be so particularly taken Notice of, except those call'd Hysterick , which seem to have been known in Greece , from whence they have deriv'd their Name…”

If, as I believe, hypochondria amplifies the sense of some irreducible but misplaced exteriority where the interior, the self is supposed to be, then it makes sense that the novelist and the hypochondriac were bound to meet. It is at the hypersensitive DMZ that we expect to find our great modern novels. This is why The Magic Mountain is such an experience for its faithful readers. Here, the thermometer looms large – one imagines it as a sort of thermometer maypole around which the characters, all with abnormal temperatures, dance. Can you even read the Magic Mountain, really read it, without feeling a bit ‘infected’?

The great readers are all people who, given the time, place and volume, are willing to invert their parents’ warning:  do make yourself sick.  Convalescence is our form of meditation.