Hypochondriasis

   The notion of "hypochondriacal melancholy" goes back to the Ancients, signifying a particular form of melancholy in which the hypochondrium (area beneath the ribs) is mainly affected. Felix Platter (1536–1614), professor of medicine at Basel, described in his 1602 textbook "a melancholic filthy vapour troubling the spirits and affecting the head [that] breeds that species of melancholy which they call hypochondriacal," a vapor that—as psychiatry historian Stanley Jackson explains in his Melancholia and Depression—Platter believed to arise from "melancholy blood" in the hypochondrial region (p. 94). Nosologist William Cullen of Edinburgh, in his First Lines of the Practice of Physic (1777), put the notion of "hypochondriasis or the hypochondriac affection" on a modern footing by kicking humors out of the picture: "In certain persons there is a state of mind distinguished by a concurrence of the following circumstances: A languour, listlessness, or want of resolution and activity with respect to all undertakings . . . . Such persons are particularly attentive to the state of their own health, to every the smallest change of feeling in their bodies; and from any unusual feeling, perhaps of the slightest kind, they apprehend great danger, and even death itself. In respect to all these feelings and apprehensions, there is commonly the most obstinate belief" (pp. 249–250, vol. III, of 1799 edition). (See also Depression: Emergence: hypochondria as a subform of depression [1860]; Hysteria-Psychosomatic-Somatization.)