History of Anorexia

        To properly understand anorexia nervosa, you’ve got to understand the historical background. The first recorded examples of human “self-starving” themselves – i.e. choosing to withhold food intake rather than having food intake being restricted by external factors (environment, competition, economics, etc.) – is during the spread of Christianity. The National Library of Medicine writes that Christian hermits believed in purification of the soul through self-starvation, to the point where a Roman girl died from starvation after believing the preaching of Saint Jerome. Catherine of Siena is a later example of self-starvation, during the 13-16th Centuries, where extreme self-induced fasting (typically in the context of religious piety) caused premature death.

        Interestingly, we can already start to see the gender difference. Female sainthood was usually associated with practices of self-sacrifice (fasting, humble dressing, self-flagellation (whipping oneself…this gets pretty dark), etc.). Women were historically tasked with making themselves weaker in the name of religious or a higher purpose. It’s interesting how that mentality carries on in today’s society.

        The religious fasting of women went to the extreme where is was called “holy anorexia” for a time, or anorexia mirabilis. This condition differs from anorexia nervosa as we know it because its motivator is religious piety and spiritual purity rather than body dysmorphia and a drive for thinness.

        The first example of anorexia having a psychological component to it is in 1770, where Morton published Phthisiologia or a Treatise of Consumptions and defined “nervous atrophy,” or self-imposed restriction on consumption of food. Morton wrote that this condition was a “ill and morbid state of the spirits,” implying a conscious/psychological component to the condition.

        Now, that’s the last of the middle ages history lesson. Since the 1950s, beauty slowly changed from favoring a rounded figure for female bodies to a slim one. As Industrialization led more women to work, the fragile and skinny figure became associated with upper-class women who could afford to abstain from strengthening their figures. Poet Lord Byron went so far as to propose the new feminine beauty ideal to be “pale, languid, anguished, and surrounded by a melancholic aura.”

An example of a woman who fulfilled this unhealthy beauty standard is the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who, with her tall and extremely thin figure embodied the beauty ideal of the 1850s. This beauty standard, based on the ability of a woman to make her body thin, trickled down into the 21st Century where it seems rooted deeply into our culture.

        However, I think it’s, for one, important to note that the feminine beauty ideal has evolved over time to suit the needs of the cultural and social norms- in other words, the boundaries set by the ruling men. Today’s America not only supplies its general population with a wide variety of cheap and calorie-rich foods, but it promotes a standard of thin beauty that is unattainable to most women with the diets available to them. This, combined with the impact of social media and the constant messaging that the younger generation receives about their bodies based on this content, has led body dysmorphia and eating disorders to become a norm amongst young women.

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I hope you learned something from this brief history of anorexia nervosa, and please stay tuned for the next issue on bulimia! Thanks for reading.