Caroline Crampton explores the history of hypochondria, drawing together cultural history and moving personal memoir.

When she was 17, Caroline Crampton developed a blood cancer which was diagnosed when a tumour appeared on her neck. After several rounds of gruelling treatment, including chemotherapy and weeks in an isolation ward, the doctors announced that her cancer was cured. But – understandably – Caroline herself was not so sure. Ever alert to new symptoms, feeling anxiously for new tumours on her neck, she worries continually that the cancer has returned.

‘The fear that there is something wrong with me, that I am sick, is always with me.’

This personal experience becomes the starting point for an exploration of the history of hypochondria or health anxiety, from the ancient Greeks to the modern wellness industry. It is, she says, ‘an ancient condition which makes itself anew for every age’.

In this episode, we learn about the earliest understandings of hypochondria from the time of Hippocrates, and how the word at first referred to a physical region of the body, the abdomen.

"A strong cultural association remains between the digestive system and our emotional state: we still talk of having a ‘gut feeling’. This sense of an instinctive understanding rooted in the abdomen, separate from more ‘rational’ knowledge in the brain, is a survivor from this era of medical theory. It’s also a key component of hypochondria. I can know logically that my every shiver is not the arrival of a fever, nor my every sneeze an indication that I have caught a deadly virus, but when the anxiety overrides this rational certainty, it can feel like a different part of me is in charge. It’s in the stomach region that I experience those ungovernable lurches of fear, as if that is still where the hypochondria rests within me, just as those Ancient Greek practitioners believed."

Caroline Crampton is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Granta, the New Humanist, and the Spectator. Her previous book The Way to the Sea (2019) is a journey down the Thames from source to sea. She hosts the Shedunnit podcast about detective fiction.

The reader, Tuppence Middleton, is a British actress known for her stage and screen roles in Downton Abbey, The Imitation Game, His Dark Materials and The Motive and the Cue.

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Produced and abridged by Elizabeth Burke and Heather Dempsey
Executive Producer: Jo Rowntree
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4
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