The Hypochondriacs

One of the gags in Woody Allen's “Whatever Works" involves Allen's neurotic alter ego (Larry David) bemoaning an ulcer. When his ridiculously young girlfriend (Evan Rachel Wood) reminds him that he doesn't have an ulcer, he retorts, “I didn't say I don't have an ulcer -- I said they haven't found one yet."

That, in a nutshell, is hypochondria today: health anxiety, inflamed by fear of illness and death, intransigent even in the face of professional reassurance, and often exacerbated by partial or incorrect information, frequently gleaned from the Internet.

Brian Dillon has firsthand familiarity with the sort of angst that afflicts the Woody Allens and other “worried well" of this world -- and he knows it can be no laughing matter.

His first book, “In the Dark Room," winner of the 2006 Irish Book Award for nonfiction, is a memoir chronicling his parents' early deaths, which heightened his concern with his own health during late adolescence and early adulthood: “I became convinced that I would be the next to die, and began to inter- pret every stray discomfort as a sign of the dread dis- ease that would take me away."

In “The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives," Dillon expands his inquiry to examine the relationship between real and imagined illness as it affected nine prominent artists and writers, ranging from James Boswell in the 18th century to Andy Warhol in the 20th.

The result is an intriguing, suavely written blend of medical history and literary criticism, a book that adds to the growing (or metastasizing) field of pathological biography.

Be warned, however, that Dillon's subjects don't neatly fit our modern notion of hypochondria as neurosis. Alice James, Charles Darwin and Marcel Proust were all chronic invalids who obsessed about their health and defined themselves through their illnesses. But they also suffered real pain and organic, if undiagnosed, ailments.

Why call them hypochondriacs? Because, as Dillon explains, the definition of hypochondria has mutated over the years, from an amorphous array of physical ailments to a largely mental, neurotic affliction.

Dillon makes a strong case that protracted illness, whether real or imaginary, enabled many of these artists to “retreat from extraneous duty" and escape into their creative work. In a sense, he notes, “hypochondria was both an illness and a cure: the catalyst or condition that allowed the artist or thinker to function . . . a kind of calling, almost a vocation, that structured a life."