Hot Milk

Medical or health tourism has a long history in English and European literature, and it begins with the “spa.” Specifically, in the 18th century, Bath became a health destination for the English aristocracy; guests would enjoy the promoted benefits of the water, both for drinking and bathing, as well as social exposure to other high-ranking members of British society. Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771) for example, portrays the Welsh aristocrat Matthew Bramble travelling to Bath to enjoy the spa.

This subgenre would then expand to include traveling for wisdom, health, and experience, such as in Thomas Mann’s philosophical novel about a sanatorium, The Magic Mountain (1924). Contemporary novels still build on these themes across genres, such as Tillie Cole’s A Thousand Broken Pieces (2024) which shows a group of grieving teens traveling the world in search of different cures for their grief, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story (2022), which infuses the traditional spa setting with Gothic elements and a feminist twist.

Hot Milk combines the tradition of the medical spa/health resort in literature with the complicated diagnosis of hypochondria, a term that is considered outdated in modern medicine. Often, hypochondria is seen as a catch-all diagnosis for patients with no clear medical issue, but who claim to be afflicted with a serious illness. Contemporarily, hypochondria is usually broken into two separate diagnoses, including somatic symptom disorder and illness anxiety disorder. The challenge in these diagnoses is the reality of psychosomatic illness, in which a person manifests symptoms to match their perception of an illness, such as Rose displaying an allergic reaction to Gomez’s octopus, despite not actually being allergic to octopus. In addition, like Rose, many individuals experiencing either of these illnesses visit medical offices incessantly, putting a specific strain on friends and family, like Sofia.