Since misery loves company — at least during the time when misery doesn’t want to be left entirely alone — I grabbed on to Brian Dillon’s new book, The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives (Faber & Faber, $25), as fast as I could. One thing I hadn’t heard said before, although it now strikes me as absolutely and undeniably true, is that misery loves good company. And Dillon’s brimming volume (278 fact-filled, not to say fun-filled, pages) certainly provides good company for the ceaselessly suffering imaginary-malady-struck.
For once the author — who never identifies himself as hypochondriacal, but why else indulge in such unnecessary woe? — gets an introduction out of the way, he tells the medical histories and mysteries of those “tormented lives.” The nine memorialized are, in more or less chronological order: James Boswell, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Alice James, Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust (probably the least surprising inclusion), Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol.