A Body Made of Glass

‘Clarity and beauty combine with terror and dark comedy - essential reading for everyone who has a body. And yes - that means every single reader in the world’ - Lucy Worsley’[A] deeply researched, subtly argued history of the condition…written with elegance and flashes of humour… Crampton is skilled at uncovering hidden connections, charting how ideas about health and medicine rise, fall and re-emerge over centuries… Memorable and vivid’ - Sophie McBain, Sunday Times ‘A clever blend of memoir and science writing that elevates a funny and faintly ridiculous subject into a piece of cultural history’ - Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday ‘Blending memoir and cultural history, A Body Made of Glass is lucid, broad in scope, full of nuanced reflection and digs deep into concepts of rationality, language, trauma, the brain v the body, class, gender and the inequity of health services’ - Fiona Sturges, Guardian

Caroline Crampton is an author and podcaster who writes about the world and how we live in it. She worked in journalism at publications like the New Statesman and The Times before focusing on literary non-fiction. Her first book, The Way to the Sea: The Forgotten Histories of the Thames Estuary (Granta, 2019); her latest book is A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria (Granta, 2024). Her award-winning podcast about golden age detective fiction, Shedunnit, is distributed by BBC Sounds. As a broadcaster, she has appeared on BBC Two, Sky News, BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 4 and her reviews have been published by the Guardian, London Review of Books and Spectator.