Word: hypochondriac
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According to Ford, somatizing disorders take many forms, including hysteria, malingering, chronic pain and hypochondriasis. The hypochondriac is preoccupied with the fear of having a serious disease. Some doctors refer to the treatment of hypochondriacs, or "crocks," as "psychoceramic medicine" and the recitation of their histories as "organ recitals." Other somatizers sometimes deliberately fake illness, going so far, for example, as to rub a thermometer on a bedsheet to produce a fever, lacerate the skin to create lesions, or overuse laxatives to disrupt the gastrointestinal tract. In the bizarre Munchausen syndrome, which, according to one estimate, affects...
There are two basic visions of it. Protectionism, in the free trader's eyes: When an economy gets sick, it wants to withdraw from the world. A protectionist psychosis sets in. The invalid retreats into the house and locks the doors and windows and pulls the shades. Hypochondriac, jittery, paranoid, the economic system settles down to feed upon its own inadequacies. It sits in its slippers by the cold furnace and thinks about how well it used to make things, long ago. It disconsolately guzzles Old Smoot-Hawley, far into the night. Then it passes out. Another economy gone...
...will not go into an elevator alone because he knows the thing will get stuck between floors and his whitened bones will be found two weeks later. He is a hypochondriac. He owns twelve video games and plays with them for an hour a day. He is convinced that his Malibu beach house will be undermined by waves, although it does not seem to be in danger, and when asleep there he spends arduous eight-hour nights dreaming of piling sandbags around the foundation. He will not set foot in the ocean because there are sharks out there. He should...
...have contemplated this annus mirabilis of weird weather with a special fascination. But even when the barometer is less mercurial, they pay almost abnormal attention to the weather's moods and the people who predict them. Americans have become chronic weather junkies. They monitor it the way a hypochondriac listens to his own breathing and heart-beat in the middle of the night. Some people, of course, have an urgent need to know: boatmen, farmers, construction workers, streetwalkers. But others whose daily exposure to the hazards of the open air is limited to three minutes between bus stop...
There is also some potential for suspense in a computer whiz, played by Paul Mazursky, who is better known as a director (An Unmarried Woman). The genius' wife is deserting him, he is a hypochondriac and chicken to boot. One imagines he might crack under the add ed strain of the caper, but he never does, and Mazursky's portrayal of a mild-mannered man is only mildly amusing...