La dura vita di un ipocondriaco (nonché rupofobico, cacorrafiafobico, euretofobico, misantropo, filosolipsista... e molto, molto altro)

«It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into - some fearful, devastating scourge, I know - and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read the symptoms - discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it - wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that too, - began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid's knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to "walk the hospitals," if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.»

Così l'incipit di uno dei più esilaranti romanzi mai partoriti da mente umana: "Three men in a boat (to say nothing about the dog)" di Jerome K. Jerome - lo scrittore umoristico britannico per antonomasia, assieme naturalmente a P.G. Woodehouse.

Ora, miei pazienti tre lettori, non so voi, ma il sottoscritto - che, a quanto si dice, sembra un incrocio tra il detective Monk e Melvin Udall (interpretato magistralmente da Jack Nicholson in "As good as it gets", inspiegabilmente tradotto come "Qualcosa è cambiato") - pare tenda ad immedesimarsi parecchio in simili descrizioni...

Forse è meno universalmente noto che anche un altro scrittore di lingua inglese, Bill Bryson (un americano vissuto a lungo in Gran Bretagna e noto come uno dei migliori travel writer), ama calcare la mano sull'autoironica citazione di ipocondria, tanatofobia e altre innocue paranoie assortite: su tutti, sottolineo il suo capolavoro sull'Australia, "In a Sunburned Country" uscito in UK col titolo di "Down Under", dove sortisce effetti comici irrresistibili la sua reiterata e ostentata elencazione (con sublime aplomb) delle "centinaia di modi terribili in cui si può morire in Australia" a causa della fauna selvatica locale: ragni redback, serpenti, coccodrilli, squali, meduse... tutti regolarmente al top delle rispettive classifiche per aggressività e/o velenosità, s'intende.

Ammettere apertamente le proprie debolezze, fino al punto di riderci su, è già una splendida sfaccettatura dell'antieroe che rende aurea la mediocritas: saperne fare un motivo d'ilarità universale è puro genio.