Glass delusion

Glass delusion was a psychiatric disorder recorded in Europe mainly in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. People affected by it held the conviction that their own body was made of glass and could therefore shatter into pieces. The delusion arose during a period when glass had become a prized and almost mystical material in Europe, associated with fragility and with the wealth and status of the nobility who could afford it. Psychiatry historian Edward Shorter of the University of Toronto has suggested that the inventive unconscious mind has, throughout history, attached its delusions to whatever new materials and technologies were prominent in the age. The condition was concentrated among educated and privileged men, including scholars, nobles and physicians, who encountered accounts of it in the medical and historical literature of the period, and it was often linked by scholars of the time to melancholia, a broader and better documented disorder.