But as governments across the globe fail to address\u2014and indeed exacerbate\u2014myriad health crises, there is good reason to question the limits of both medical knowledge and available care. In \u201cThe Health of Us,\u201d composed in 2009, the poet Claudia Rankine writes:<\/p>\n
if\u00a0justice was how love showed itself in public\u00a0then love<\/p>\n
was defined by access to care when someone anyone<\/p>\n
thought that cough that burned the chest<\/p>\n
was probably nothing but who knew \u20263<\/a><\/p>\n In a poem about the promises and possibilities of universal healthcare, the speaker does not bemoan hypochondria as a waste of shared resources. Rather, Rankine suggests that the body\u2019s ambiguities are all the more reason why care should be available to \u201csomeone anyone\u201d in the throes of such uncertainty.<\/p>\n More than a decade later, the literature of hypochondria wrestles with how politics shapes both medical information and healthcare. Recently, two books on hypochondria by English writers have traced its long cultural history, turning to figures ranging from\u00a0John Donne to George Costanza. Both Caroline Crampton\u2019s\u00a0A Body Made of Glass:\u00a0A Cultural History of Hypochondria\u00a0and Will Rees\u2019s\u00a0Hypochondria\u00a0recount stories of health anxiety to illustrate Belling\u2019s claim that hypochondria mobilizes questions about the limits of biomedical knowledge and discourse. Meanwhile, Spanish writer Marta Sanz\u2019s autofiction narrative of ambiguous chronic pain,\u00a0My Clavicle: And Other Massive Misalignments, translated by Katie King,\u00a0expands the\u00a0hypochondriac\u2019s concerns to other realms of 21st-century life. What, she asks, does it cost to be ill amid economic crises?<\/p>\n Taken together, these new works present hypochondria as at once a personal and a global phenomenon. As such, they offer illness narratives that are less accounts of sickness itself than reckonings with medicine\u2019s limitations.<\/p>\n Today, health anxiety is characterized largely by the patient\u2019s relationship with healthcare. The hypochondriac is at once suspicious of medical authority and eager for it to advance, as when Rees fantasizes about \u201ca scan that would light up every region of my body\u201d and offer \u201ccomplete and perfect knowledge.\u201d If, as Belling argues, hypochondria is at its core a \u201ccondition of doubt,\u201d then its primary task is to throw into question each new development in biomedical understandings of human health. As Crampton puts it, \u201cour fears keep pace with our knowledge\u201d\u2014and that knowledge is always politically circumscribed.<\/p>\n Taken together, these new works present hypochondria as at once a personal and a global phenomenon. As such, they offer illness narratives that are less accounts of sickness itself than reckonings with medicine\u2019s limitations.<\/p>\n While both A Body Made of Glass and Hypochondria situate their authors\u2019 health anxiety within a long tradition, they also portray hypochondria as a condition entirely contingent on one\u2019s historical moment. They each detail, for instance, the early understanding of hypochondria as a specific physical malady (its etymological origins lie in the Greek hupo, or \u201cunder,\u201d and khondros, which refers to the cartilage of the sternum). They show, too, how in the 19th century, hypochondria was increasingly seen as a nervous condition. It became associated with men largely through its differentiation from the feminized condition of hysteria, and both were seen as distinctly white, middle-class diagnoses. Notably, both Crampton and Rees penned their books at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a period that prompted new anxieties about illness. As cultural histories of hypochondria, then, both books highlight the term\u2019s malleability and use it as a window onto shifting medical and scientific beliefs.<\/p>\n Many patients seeking care have good reason to doubt medical knowledge. Race, gender, and class significantly impact healthcare providers\u2019 perceptions of their patients\u2019 credibility.4<\/a> Furthermore, as part of what Rees describes as medical research\u2019s \u201ccircular logic,\u201d conditions disproportionately affecting already marginalized groups tend to receive less research funding, which in turn positions those patients\u2019 complaints as outside the boundaries of medical understanding.<\/p>\n Even when medical knowledge accounts for a patient\u2019s physical experience, uneven access to care often exacerbates health inequities. Because both Crampton and Rees live in the United Kingdom, their contact with medicine occurs within the context of the UK\u2019s National Health Service (NHS). Both note the NHS\u2019s limitations: for Crampton, its bureaucracy; for Rees, its privatization. But they also hold up the United States\u2019 for-profit healthcare system as a foil for their own. The US, Rees notes, is \u201ca country where certain members of the worried well can enjoy limitless choice while window-shopping for ailments at the same time that millions of the un- or under-insured can barely afford a blood test.\u201d Crampton, too, points out that Hispanic, Indigenous, and Black Americans are disproportionately likely to find themselves among the 27 million without health insurance.<\/p>\n As both writers make clear, many patients bring economic fears to the clinic. Recalling a prolonged period of concerns about his health that involved a series of time-consuming appointments, Rees notes that these \u201crecent absences had been expensive\u201d due to his lack of paid sick leave. Imagining the experiences of Americans and others navigating extensive medical bills, Crampton remarks, \u201cThe performance anxiety that I feel in trying to accurately represent my symptoms and experiences to a doctor would be amplified many times over with so much money at stake.\u201d In other words, she describes a kind of healthcare anxiety, in which financial stressors amplify existing fears about physical health.<\/p>\n Perhaps, then, the fear of illness is not so irrational, given both the realities of under-researched conditions and the prospect of not being able to access care without significant financial consequences. Although Crampton and Rees confess their affinity for the term \u201chypochondria\u201d (even as it becomes clinically obsolete), their books invite a broader stance of uncertainty that transcends individual anxiety. Indeed, A Body Made of Glass and Hypochondria do more than defend the hypochondriacal position. They invite readers to ask questions of their own about the systems they rely on for care.<\/p>\n The hypochondriac\u2019s uncertainty finds a new sense of urgency in Sanz\u2019s autofiction narrative, My Clavicle. The first English translation of Sanz\u2019s work, My Clavicle is a dizzying, fragmented book that centers on a mysterious pain plaguing an insistently self-contradicting narrator. The book opens with the narrator noting \u201cthe presence of a particular rib underneath my left breast. And, on that rib, I feel a bump like the head of a pin, or a literal bloodsucking tick, and suddenly I\u2019m sure it\u2019s the harbinger of a malignancy.\u201d Notably, anatomical location of this first pain harkens back to hypochondria\u2019s origins beneath (hupo) the sternum (khondros). However, much like the shifting status of the term \u201chypochondria\u201d itself, the narrator\u2019s pain moves and transforms over the course of the book, taking on manifold meanings and eventually making its way to her titular clavicle. Throughout the book, she is unable to decide whether she is a \u201can actual hypochondriac\u201d or is having a rational response to the prospect of being ill in the 21st century.<\/p>\n Like Crampton and Rees, Sanz narrates ambiguous pain largely through a series of disappointing medical appointments. While the various specialists she encounters offer a range of theories for her pain, she observes that \u201cno one mentions the word menopause,\u201d though the narrator is in her late 40s. She makes clear, though, that such an explanation would offer little relief in the context of Spain\u2019s underfunded Servicio Nacional de Salud. While, in typical hypochondriacal fashion, she craves medical expertise\u2014\u201csomeone in a white lab coat\u201d who can provide both \u201ca name\u201d and \u201ca painkiller\u201d for what ails her\u2014she also recognizes the barriers to such interventions. \u201cSorry,\u201d she ventriloquizes, briefly becoming the lab coat\u2013wearing expert herself, \u201cthere\u2019s no budget for that. Because its fucking natural, isn\u2019t it?\u201d For Sanz, the hypochondriac\u2019s fantasy is not only of an all-seeing test, but also of changes to healthcare funding. She\u2019s as concerned with the limits of medical knowledge as she is with the Spanish healthcare system\u2019s failure to invest in understanding aging women\u2019s bodies.<\/p>\n When she describes her current phase of life as \u201cthe age of mysterious ailments,\u201d the narrator refers not only to the changes wrought by menopause but also to fears that include \u201cending up \u2026 broke.\u201d When one healthcare provider asks what she\u2019s afraid of, the narrator confesses, \u201cOf being sick. Of not being able to work.\u201d She is, she explains, \u201csick with fear that the world is collapsing and that my illness will keep me from paying the bills.\u201d Pain, for Sanz\u2019s narrator, is inextricable from financial precarity. She reckons, too, with the marketplace into which the ill are thrust. She imagines weighing her ambiguous pain on a \u201ccapitalist scale\u201d to determine both its nature and what it might cost her. Predicting that she will become mired in either the labyrinth of modern healthcare or the behemoth wellness industry, she determines that there is little relief in diagnosis under capitalism.<\/p>\n Throughout My Clavicle, Sanz\u2019s narrator wonders whether the ambiguously unwell are simply \u201cself-absorbed\u201d or rather are absorbed by the innumerable global crises that \u201chave all entered our bloodstream.\u201d She aligns herself with other Spanish women writers who \u201cunderstand the uncertainty of our lives during a global recession and brutal government austerity, and \u2026 write about it because it pains us.\u201d Sanz posits that this porous boundary between self and world can also be a site of dissent. When women confront the anxiety elicited by governmental harm and \u201cresist by somatizing it, making it physical,\u201d the disproportionate rates of ambiguous illness in women register as a symptom of patriarchy.<\/p>\n Furthermore, though she attributes both her ill health and her financial anxieties to her gender and age, Sanz also insists that \u201cthe economic crisis and the government\u2019s austerity policy and its fallout have made us old before our time.\u201d Toward the end of the book, she writes,<\/p>\n The belt tightening, benefits cuts, ridiculous government euphemisms, political profanities and angry outbursts, and personal income tax withholding and 21 percent VAT have all entered our bloodstream, like demonic bacteria, and are now, in fact, part of our platelet count and will cause the disease that, I swear to god, is going to kill us all.<\/p>\n As the Spanish government\u2019s austerity measures spill out of the narrator like a litany of distressing symptoms, her supposed health anxiety becomes fully legible as concerns about vulnerability in the absence of care. Indeed, even as her insistently self-contradicting narrator draws readers into the uncertainty of living with an \u201cimaginary illness,\u201d Sanz underscores the very real political forces that make disease a prospect worth fearing.<\/p>\n Near the end of My Clavicle, Sanz\u2019s narrator expresses her need \u201cto name what\u2019s happening to me and, with the name, feel that I\u2019m part of something.\u201d Clinical diagnoses can certainly provide this sense of community by likening a patient\u2019s condition to that of others. Even the label \u201chypochondria,\u201d in Crampton\u2019s experience, \u201coffers companionship while in the grip of a fear that can be completely isolating\u201d because it \u201cconnects sufferers stretching back over 2,000 years.\u201d<\/p>\n But there are also other kinds of collectivity that can aid the hypochondriac. \u201cIf health care were available to everyone,\u201d writes historian Timothy Snyder in Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary, \u201cwe would be not only healthier physically but also healthier mentally. Our lives would be less anxious and lonely because we would not be thinking that our survival depended on our relative economic and social position.\u201d5<\/a> Indeed, by learning, as Rankine puts it in \u201cThe Health of Us,\u201d \u201cto see \/ our range of possibilities as a precious commodity,\u201d we might invest in systems of care that place value on human life\u2014with all of its attendant uncertainties.6<\/a>\u00a0![\"End](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/logo-icon.jpg\"){kind=icon}
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