Gone to pie

摘要

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze suggested that great artists are a special kind of doctor looking for the hidden codes of their and our neurotic sicknesses. The renowned cultural critic Brian Dillon serves up here a select batch of these high functioning whiners. His magnificently tortured tragicomic nine are James Boswell, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, the hyperdelusional German judge Daniel Paul Schreber [BMJ2008;337:a614, doi:10.1136/bmj.a614), Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould, Andy Warhol, and Alice James, sister of Henry. The last of these memorably referred to her episodes of psychosomatic illness as "going to pie." Dillon acknowledges that as a character type the hypochondriac is "pretty disreputable, a malingering drain on one's capacity for patience and empathy, at worst a parasite on scarce health care resources." However, he strikes a note of caution: "We behave ... as if the boundary between sensible vigilance . .. and pathological preoccupation or fear were perfectly clear, when it is not." And you will recognise this assertion: "It may even appear for the hypochondriac [that] the solidity of a real disease is preferable to the fog of optimism and uncertainty that passes for most of us, most of the time, as good health." They (we?) crave a label.