Oliver Burkeman on whether monitoring your body for a defect can really induce the feeling it’s happening
In Singapore, in autumn 1967, hundreds of men and boys hurried to hospital emergency rooms, clutching their penises, convinced they were rapidly retracting into their bodies and that if they let go of them, they’d die. Such panics aren’t as rare as you might imagine. In the early 2000s, in Nigeria and Benin, several people were killed in retaliation for using magic to shrink their enemies’ genitals. The vanishing-penis phenomenon – known by its south-east Asian name, koro – is listed in the psychiatry bible, the DSM, and has cropped up worldwide for centuries.
A common response is to scoff at the ignorance of the uneducated. But in The Geography Of Madness, journalist Frank Bures shows that what such “culture-bound syndromes” demonstrate is the astonishing power of culture and belief – on all of us. Whether you’re Beninese, Bolivian or British, the ways your life goes wrong will be heavily influenced by how you believe it could go wrong.
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