Will Rees' Hypochondria

Reviewed by Maria Meindl

(Coach House Books, 2025)

Talk was free in the house where my father grew up. Mostly. No one had to pay a quarter for swearing, but my grandmother did have a lucrative source of income in her “hypochondria jar.” My father and grandfather had to fork over a quarter every time they wanted to vent their health anxieties. I inherited the condition – or learned it. The diagnosis came when I was a small child. I got an eyelash in my eye and concluded it was slowly burrowing its way into my brain. I waited until my parents noticed the redness and swelling before disclosing that I didn’t have long to live.

Things only got worse from there, spurred on recently by an uptick in medical screenings. Genetics aside, my age alone places me in a higher risk category for certain conditions, and there are various regular scopes and scans to worry about in the course of year. Spring is for bone density. Fall is mammogram season. There is the ongoing concern of blood pressure, and every few years I get a trifecta in the form of a colonoscopy, where I get to worry about the preparation, the test and the results.

So you can imagine my delight when I came across Will Rees’s Hypochondria, which interweaves a historical, literary, psychoanalytic and philosophical survey of hypochondria with a personal story. It’s also a book about the pursuit of feeling “well” that admirably avoids the tropes of betterment narratives. The writing is scholarly, but it’s also lively and compelling. It’s an extended philosophical essay that I couldn’t put down.

I found it therapeutic to read because it ennobled my lifelong affliction, which I’ve always treated as a shameful joke. And it also helped me realize I’m in good company. Sigmund Freud and Susan Sontag feature among the many theorists weighing in about hypochondria, as do Gilles Deleuze, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and Catherine Belling. The line between theorists and theorized is not clear, and this is one of the topics Rees explores. Herman Melville, Dr. Johnson, both William James and his sister, Alice, all suffered from hypochondria. So did Franz Kafka (of course) and they all wrote about their affliction. Hypochondria is connected to writing and may even accompany certain stages of the creative process, but – as Rees points out – it’s also a type of reading, a drive to interpret the body’s messages.

In his chapter “The Power of Naming,” Rees discusses the phenomenon of diagnosis, which is feared, but also desired: “Where many people are content to be namelessly sick, hypochondriacs tend to be heavily invested in the idea that their suffering is caused by a single, identifiable disease.” Diagnosis can validate the sufferer’s concerns and provide a treatment plan. Yet: “there is a touch of magic in naming, an element of fantasy that is not exhausted by these reasonable explanations.” And of course, hypochondria is, itself, a diagnosis, with its own physiological and psychological explanations, and they have changed over the years. For Rees, hypochondria is entwined with the drive to create narrative, and that’s what makes it so interesting.

The downside of hypochondriacs writing about themselves is that they may universalize their own experience of hypochondria, and I did find myself wishing periodically that Rees would discuss “the hypochondriac” a little less and just come right out and say “I.” His often-repeated contention, for instance, that hypochondria centres on doubt, gave me pause. It’s a matter of doubting the conclusions of doctors, even the results of tests: “In its purest form, hypochondria can be expressed as the question: how can I know my body? Or better still: can I know it?”
 
Is there a pure form of hypochondria? As a child I was afraid of the inside of my body and compulsively interpreted its messages as negative. Anything passing from in to out, or out to in, seemed a threat. Hypochondria is different for me now. It’s a way of managing my fear of being taken off guard by illness. If I worry about it enough it won’t happen. Magical thinking, in other words. Rees addresses this component – and many other aspects of hypochondria – eloquently, but there were times when his return to the theme of doubt drained some of the subtlety from his arguments. Could there not be as many types of hypochondria as there are sufferers?
 
But I wouldn’t be thinking about any of this, and wouldn’t have the words to write about it had I not read (more precisely, devoured) this book. It provided language and context for something that has largely remained in the shadows, despite having been a driving force in my life. And despite the odd blanket statement, there is nothing reductive about this book. It presents hypochondria as a window into the human condition. Rees’s book becomes a meditation on how people experience living in their bodies, and how they assign meaning to that experience.

Rees historicizes this inner dimension of experience within a white European tradition of science, literature and thought. As he points out, advances in technology have changed people’s relationship with their bodies. From the 16th century anatomical revalations of Vesalius, which challenged the theory of the four humours, to the invention of the X-ray and scanning technologies, to new home-based (and phone-based) tracking devices and genetic testing, humans are becoming more transparent, to ourselves and others. Rees observes: “[B]rief, calamitous death has become the exception, as death typically occurs after a long, uncertain struggle with an ultimately fatal condition which might have been diagnosed years, potentially many years, before its final stages.” Hypochondria thrives in spite of, and maybe because of, these developments.
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The thinking in this book is elegant, and the writing breathtaking at times. Here is Rees on Joan Didion: “The migraines that regularly kept Didion hauled up in bed appear to be an unbearable but not unwelcome remission from the aching responsibilities of everyday life. And in this sense a sort of pain relief.” The prolonged headache Rees himself suffered in youth was, on the other hand, “terribly bearable”: "​​My entire life came to resemble one of those days when … in answer to the question ‘what’s wrong’ we are obliged through gritted teeth, to answer ‘nothing’ so as to spare ourselves the graver indignity of uttering ‘everything.’"

Did you laugh when you read that? I sure did. With the author, not at him. Hypochondria, as Rees points out, is often associated with comedy. I enjoy laughing at/with neurotics because their problems are not the big ones. They invite me into a world of their/our self-created suffering, taking focus from the real and growing problems of the world.
 
But hypochondria is not any defense against illness. Among the many emotions that washed over me when my father suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage at the age of sixty-six was a sense of betrayal. But he was so careful! And I don’t just mean he avoided salt. He thought of everything but the aneurysm lying in wait for him, probably for his whole life. It’s not that he had betrayed me: our shared hypochondria had. Weirdly, he was a placid and even cheerful patient. Maybe he was relieved.

Rees’s book starts out strong, but it really begins to shine about half-way through, when he investigates what happens when hypochondriacs confront real illness. Ironies and ambiguities emerge in dazzling layers, and they emerge slowly, just like the awareness that hypochondria never protected anyone. It has a function far more complex and nuanced than the magical thinking that may have engendered it.
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Rees considers the playwright Molière, who passed away while performing the lead role in his Imaginary Invalid. He had gone onstage despite the urgings of friends who saw how sick he was: 

​Which is to say that Molière was hiding his illness, and that in playing the hypochondriac that February evening, he was playing the part of a healthy person who, in turn, plays another healthy person who believes he is sick and at one point pretends to be dead. And yet, beneath the layers of performance, and indifferent to each of these nice ironies, there was the simple, banal fact of a disease-stricken body belonging to a fifty-one-year-old man.

Slivers of Rees’s own story are inserted into this book with, I dare say, surgical precision. Remarks about his symptoms and various attempts to understand them have a tip-of-the-iceberg quality, and are presented with a bare minimum of context. At first, I craved more details; then I had to ask myself why? Was I just trying to fit Rees into a familiar illness (and recovery) narrative? Rees’s writing studiously defies that kind of interpretation. His own story came into focus toward the end, but only after I’d abandoned all tidy attempts to explain his hypochondria. For all the brilliance of his ideas, this book works so well because of Rees’s autobiographical revelations, and because he uses them so sparingly. Was he really sick? If so, with what? And what would it mean if he was, or wasn’t? And what is ‘sick’ anyway? In a delightfully sneaky way, the book becomes a page-turner. The glimpses of Rees’s life serve as a backbone for his philosophical and historical explorations, and make Hypochondria a propulsive and deeply satisfying read. 

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Maria Meindl is the author of a memoir, Outside the Box, a novel, The Work, as well as many short fiction and non-fiction pieces, including in The Temz Review. In 2005, she founded the Draft Reading Series, which is still going strong after 20 years. She teaches Feldenkrais movement classes, and runs a webinar series called The Work, Straight Talk on Craft and Method, about the history of wellness, fitness and performer-training methods.