I am in the thick of reading Brian Dillon’s excellent book Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives. There is an interesting passage on an imagined affliction I’ve never heard of before:
In the history of such eccentric torments, none is stranger or more instructive than the so-called ‘glass delusion’. From the late Middle Ages onwards, this remarkably specific and consistent notion appears time and again in the literature on melancholia and hypochondria. The patient, as the reader will have surmised, fantacies that he or she is made of glass, either in part or in whole. (In a series of related delusions, patients may imagine that they have lost limbs, that they have been turned into animals, that they are dead, that they do no exist or, as in the case of an unforuntae baker who was afraid to go near his oven, that they are made of butter.) This has predicatable consequences: the ‘glass man’ fears for his physical safety, avoiding not only hard knocks but in some cases any touch at all from another person, as well as such delicate operations as sitting or lying down. The broad outlines of the delusion – imagining that one is made of a brittle
substance – were not unknown to antiquity: classical accounts of earthenware men abound, but the spread of glass in the Early Modern period brought with it the possibility of thinking oneself made of less sturdy stuff …
The book features famous hypochondriacs including Darwin, Florence Nightengale, Charlotte Bronte and Andy Warhol, with a particular focus on the specific kind of craziness so completely epitomized by the Victorians. It’s a very interesting read.
Image: Broken Glass by Davetoaster