O’Sullivan doesn’t offer easy answers. She just shows us, with wonderful compassion and the minimum of judgment, the ways in which people across the world have manifested symptoms that have helped them through – or beyond – painful situations . . . It is, in every sense, mind-blowing.

Neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan takes us on a tour of puzzling and seemingly inexplicable illnesses, including a sleeping sickness that affects refugee children in Sweden, severe headaches afflicting embassy staff in Cuba and mass outbreaks of fainting among Colombian schoolgirls. It’s utterly fascinating, and told with extraordinary compassion.

O’Sullivan travels the world collecting fascinating stories of culture-bound syndromes, which she relays with nuance and sensitivity.

A bracing read, a little like a cold shower on a hot summer’s day.

The stories are remarkable. But no less remarkable is O’Sullivan’s revelation of the way we all absorb cultural expectations of illness and reject or exhibit symptoms in response . . . Her enlightening and sympathetic book should be required reading for all doctors – and for all patients.

To compare any book to a Sacks is unfair, but this one lives up to it. Not because it is alluringly freakish, but because it is so compassionate, and so driven by deep curiosity about the human psyche. I finished it feeling thrillingly unsettled, and wishing there was more.

By making social problems visible on the body, O’Sullivan believes, these conditions allow voiceless people to make
themselves heard. Perhaps this eloquent and convincing book will be the start of making people in authority listen, make change and help.

O’Sullivan’s beautifully written book interweaves the stories of those afflicted in this way around the world, in a travelogue of illness that is ultimately a travelogue of our own irrational, suggestible minds . . . It is a measure of how effective O’Sullivan is at describing the dilemmas and difficulties of treating psychosomatic conditions that, by the end, a visit to a witch doctor begins to feel like the most sensible medical intervention in the book.

Each case study peels back the rigid framework of modern medicine and demands that we reframe our understanding of what is and isn’t illness. This is a progressive book that doesn’t hold back on criticising the dogged diagnostic obsessions of Western medicine.

No one doubts that there is something genuinely wrong with these children, yet medicine cannot locate it. O’ Sullivan tours the clusters to see if she can do any better.

In this fascinating book, O’Sullivan makes a case for empathy.

In my view the best science writer around – a true descendant of Oliver Sacks.