BOSTON.  At the Borders Bookstore in downtown Boston, the lines snake around the building with shoppers of all sorts.  Sometimes the contrasts are striking, as ramrod-straight businessmen stand next to tattooed and pierced Goths, but the chilly social distance New Englanders are known for often melts away when two apparently disparate individuals discover a common interest.

“You’re reading ‘101 Diseases’?  I’ve heard it’s great,” says Alton Boyle, a senior vice president at a commercial insurance company, to Amy Weintraub, a poetry slammer who likes to dress up in medieval costume by night, but who is a sales clerk in a greeting card store by day.

Amy, off-duty

“It is,” she replies.  “I’m buying one for my friend Susan, who’s home sick–sort of–in bed right now.”

“Please sign it ‘To my incredibly sick friend’.”

The book the two unlikely conversationalists are discussing is “101 Diseases to Get Before You Die”, a variation on the “101″ publishing format that has already produced the best-selling “101 Places to Visit Before You Die”, “101 Things to Do Before You Die”, and, for men, ”101 Women to Have Unfulfilled Fantasies About Before You Die”.  Author Rob Watson says he wrote the book to give hypochondriacs a sense of purpose that is often lacking as they try to summon up the will to fight imaginary illnesses.

“You’re all out of it?  I think I’m going to be sick.”

“People tend to think of hypochondriacs as slackers, but it’s a real disease,” Watson says from his living room couch as he nurses a bad case of either Osgood-Schlacter’s Disease or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, he’s not sure which.  “For many people it’s the tip of the iceberg, or the cherry on the sundae, since they also suffer from one or more fictitious ailments.”

Baron von Munchausen, before he died of his own personalized disease.

The term “hypchondria” refers to an excessive preoccupation with one’s health, often characterized by imagined symptoms and a tendency to discount physician’s assurances of one’s well-being.  It is distinct from Munchausen Syndrome, a psychiatric disorder whose victims feign disease or illness in order to call attention to themselves.  There is no known cure for Munchausen Syndrome, which causes thousands of agonizing imaginary deaths each year.

“Sue Ellen Minorkle is out today–can you take over on the quarter-inch nut driver thingy?”

Employers often fight worker’s compensation claims for hypochondria, saying it is a drag on productivity and unfair to other employees who must wait until real disease strikes in order to use their sick days.  “We try to be sensitive to people who are congenital liars, but hypochondria just kinda sticks in my craw,” says Ellen Eustis, head of human resources at Lone Star Wing Nuts in Amarillo, Texas.  “I mean, seriously–if you’re gonna get sick have the decency to go out and get a real disease.”