The Hypochondriacs

The Hypochondriacs - Paperback

$21.99
$21.99
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The Hypochondriacs
  • The Hypochondriacs
The Hypochondriacs - Paperback

The Hypochondriacs - Paperback

by Brian Dillon
$21.99
$21.99

Book Overview

Charlotte Brontë found in her illnesses, real and imagined, an escape from familial and social duties, and the perfect conditions for writing. The German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber believed his body was being colonized and transformed at the hands of God and doctors alike. Andy Warhol was terrified by disease and by the idea of disease. Glenn Gould claimed a friendly pat on his shoulder had destroyed his ability to play piano. And we all know someone who has trawled the Internet in solitude, seeking to pinpoint the source of his or her fantastical symptoms.

The Hypochondriacs is a book about fear and hope, illness and imagination, despair and creativity. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And, in an intimate investigation of those lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Through witty, entertaining, and often moving examinations of the lives of these eminent hypochondriacs--James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Alice James, Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould, and Andy Warhol--Brian Dillon brilliantly unravels the tortuous connections between real and imagined illness, irrational fear and rational concern, the mind's aches and the body's ideas.
ISBN9780865479463
Author Brian Dillon
PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
GenreBiography and Self-help & personal development
FormatPaperback
PublishedFebruary 2011
LanguageENG- English
Pages288
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Biography & Autobiography Nonfiction Psychology

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More by Brian Dillon

The Hypochondriacs

The Hypochondriacs - Paperback

The Hypochondriacs - Paperback

By Brian Dillon

About Brian Dillon

Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism (all published by New York Review Books), as well as The Great Explosion (short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (short-listed for the Wellcome Book Prize), and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for nonfiction. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, frieze, and Artforum. He has curated exhibitions for the Tate and Hayward galleries. He lives in London.

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