Rees, William; (2025) Studies in Hypochondria. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

‘Studies in Hypochondria’ is a creative–critical PhD comprising two components. The creative component is a book-length essay titled Hypochondria which combines elements of literary biography, medical history, cultural criticism, and memoir as it pursues the often-elusive meanings of hypochondria. Here, I draw out various connections between the hypochondriac and the reader. Treating hypochondria itself as a way of reading, I question the hypochondriac’s desire for interpretative certainty while turning to other forms of interpretation – literary and psychoanalytic – that have creatively embraced the inevitable need to re-read. This creative component is intended to be essayistic and speculative; the connections between its wide-ranging materials are allowed to surface via recursion and association. The second component, ‘“That Terrible Disease”: Syphilis and Syphilophobia in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century Britain’, is an academic case study of a specific form of hypochondria: syphilophobia or venereal hypochondriasis. This diagnosis first entered medical textbooks in the final years of the nineteenth century and was largely considered obsolete by the middle of the twentieth century. Where the creative component makes a virtue of the heterogeneity of its subject matter, pursuing its topic over a long period and through geographically dispersed texts, the critical component delineates a narrower field of focus and periodisation as it examines the cultural factors that informed the construction of this specific, short-lived form of hypochondria in British literature and culture. Together these two documents aim to enhance our understanding of hypochondria by adopting diverging yet complementary approaches to the topic.

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