Sick or Neurotic? This Writer Will Be the Judge.

•

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

HYPOCHONDRIA, by Will Rees

As a cultural attitude, “ignorance is bliss” has sort of fallen out of favor. Much more de rigueur: “Do the work,” “the only way out is through,” “see something say something.” Never mind that Thomas Gray’s 18th-century adage happens to be true, and, in the case of the inner machinations of our own physical bodies, ethically uncompromising.

We are a society of hypochondriacs, a band of idiots roving through TikTok and Reddit and Apple Watch data and WebMD for the pseudoscientific meanings of our symptoms, the diagnoses of our own mortality. But as any armchair therapist will tell you, the high of control is short-lived. No sooner do we digest another physiological factoid than the hunger comes back tenfold, in the form of even more questions than we had before.

This rabbit hole is explored in stylish detail by the English book editor and academic Will Rees in “Hypochondria,” a compact treatise that spirals through memoir, history and theory in an effort to grab hold of its slippery subject.

Rees doesn’t, of course, but that failure only redirects him. Hypochondria, he writes, “is a diagnosis that puts into question how certain we can ever be about any diagnosis,” itself included. “Call it what you will, it’s the uncertainty that interests me, not the labels with which we try to contain it.”