A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author's history of anxiety and the history of the efforts by scientists, philosophers, artists, and writers to understand anxiety.As recently as thirty years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Drawing on his lifelong battle with anxiety, Stossel gives us an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand anxiety both from the medical and experiential perspective--from the earliest medical accounts (Galen, Hippocrates) through later observers (Robert Burton, Søren Kierkegaard) to the great nineteenth-century scientists who began to explore its sources and causes (William James, Freud). Included are accounts of individuals who struggled with anxiety (Charles Darwin, Samuel Johnson, Walker Percy), as well as afflicted generations of his own family. Stossel's portrait of anxiety...