Sarah Tolmie’s
Disease is a strangely funny book about fictitious diseases and psychological conditions. Presented in a scholarly tone that resembles a series of academic case studies, this book looks at some bizarre ailments that range from scavenging, a psychological affliction in which people compulsively move into old houses, to a poor guy who developed an allergy to comedy.
Tolmie’s imagination runs wild in this book. There are new diseases being discovered all the time, as the COVID-19 pandemic so violently reminded the world, but the illnesses presented in
Disease are not only new but also quite strange, unique in their symptomatology, and fun to read about. For example, a man wakes up one day to find out he is made of glass, a poor young women suffers from “chronic misrecognition” – a disease that makes others confuse her with a variety of people, both male and female – and a man is followed by animals wherever he goes. Tolmie’s serious tone and the heartbr