Nameless Diseases

Dedicated hypochondriacs on the lookout for potential afflictions lurking within themselves won't find this book of much use, though it does have an index of tricky-to-diagnose diseases and a handful of first-person case histories. This is really a philosophical and sociological inquiry, a bit dry and severely academic. It's not about diseases so much as about what diseases mean. Ziporyn, a medical journalist and former editor at the Journal of the American Medical Association , seeks to explain the complexities and importance of the naming of an illness. She explores the language employed by doctors, patients, researchers and journalists to describe maladies. She details the historical and philosophical evolution of disease classification, as well as providing examples of once-unnamed ailments (seasonal affective disorder, the migraine and endometriosis among them). If the first-person acccounts are flat and one-dimensional, far more interesting are Ziporyn's discussions of how we benefit when we suffer from a known disease: ``Once we can attach a name to our illness . . . we can fit ourselves into a very specific niche; this alleviates fears of even worse conditions, tells us what we can expect, and gives us faith that the doctor can choose an appropriate course of action.'' (June)