Word: hypochondria
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...while, he fretted over not producing the big book that his ability seemed to decree. But writing novels did not interest him, and his curiosity about the world was too sprightly to be harnessed for the long haul. He regularly worried himself sick; hypochondria be came a lifelong pal. As a Cornell student, he was convinced that he had consumption; in his later years he noted: "I have had a frog in my throat for some time now, and of course with me this develops almost instantly into cancer of the larynx, because that...
...serious implications, somewhat irritating to contemplate? Part of the problem resides in the term itself. It is too apocalyptic (in its private, individual way). Burnout implies a violent process ending in a devastation. The term perfectly captures an American habit of hyperbole and narcissism working in tandem: a hypochondria of the spirit. The idea contains a sneaking self-aggrandizement tied to an elusive self-exoneration. In the concept of burnout, there is no sense of human process, of the ups and downs-even the really awful downs-to which all men and women, in all history, have been subject...
...because the scientific establishment to which he belongs keeps warning us, every other day, it seems, of some new carcinogen that has been found in the air we breathe, the water we drink or the food we eat. Under these depressing circumstances, hypochondria seems to me not only normal but inevitable...
...plot is wafer thin. Henry Williams (Charles Repole) is slight in stature but huge in hypochondria, and so full of pills that when he sneezes "people around me get cured." By happenstance, Henry extricates Sally Morgan, a coy maiden winsomely played by Beth Austin, from the maritally-minded clutches of Sheriff Bob (J. Kevin Scannell), a sage brush Keystone Kop. Sally's true love is Hiawatha, or rather, Wanenis (Franc Luz), a noble North American savage from red-blooded Dartmouth. She gets him, and after a number of featherbrained misadventures, Henry finds perfect health and pneumatic bliss...
Midge Decter, author and journalist, on our "massive national hypochondria. We think of nothing so much as what we put into our mouths...