A change of mind...

Fiction titles are sometimes changed to be more nuanced and suit the country of publication. For example, Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow by Peter Høeg, translated from the Danish - I gave it my dear late stepdad in 1993 - was published as Smilla's Sense of Snow in the USA. Smilla - a half Danish scientist with an Inuit mother -  has 'a feeling for snow', which is helping her solve the death of an Inuit child who is her neighbour's son in Copenhagen.

What may be more surprising is that the UK title of Suzanne O'Sullivan's popular-science book It's All in Your Head (2015) has been changed to Is it All in Your Head? for  recent  publication in USA.

This title change from bold declaration to interrogative has, I'd bet, nothing to do with British/American English differences but more suggests that publishers are now well aware of the fire O'Sullivan has come under for her ludicrous, irresponsible and harmful chapter 'Rachel', in which she frames ME/CFS as psychosomatic. This 'subtle tweak', of course, does nothing to ennoble the content, but does highlight a lack of certainty, which is surely a little embarrassing for a prize-winning science book. We can only hope that the next tweaking will be Is it All in Suzanne's Head?

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This is a very good recent paper from Leonard Jason and Julia Newton and others, which explains the differences in criteria between 'chronic fatigue syndrome' and myalgic encephalomyelitis - signalling how crucial it is to know which disease we are diagnosing/studying (Suzanne O'Sullivan would do well to read it). Ramsay-defined ME - also known as classic ME - has the most physically impaired patients - and to fit the criteria you must have: acute onset with three major symptom categories: post-exertional malaise, neurological manifestations,  autonomic manifestations. Of course, I have all of these, though in the eighties, we didn't yet call the tell-tale burning/exhaustion in muscles 'post-exertional malaise' (PEM), we didn't know not being able to stand was 'orthostatic intolerance', and we didn't know not being able to remember the names of neighbours we had known for twenty years was 'brain fog' - we just felt as if we were dying.