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“Alice James was the younger sister of both the novelist Henry James and the psychologist William James. She experienced ill health for most of her life, mostly dismissed as hysteria, before dying at the age of 43 from breast cancer. She began keeping a diary in 1889, when she was already in her 40s and existing in a state of near-constant invalidism. Like Schreber’s Memoirs, her writing is valuable both because it comes from the patient’s perspective, and because it was written in real-time rather than with hindsight. Alice shows us how frustratingly non-linear her condition is; periods of chronic but manageable weakness are punctuated by seemingly random acute attacks that render her bed-bound and, at times, unable to walk.” Read more...
The best books on Hypochondria
Caroline Crampton, Memoirist
