Naughty Girls and Angry Doctors: Eating Disorder Patients and their Therapists

Naughty Girls and Angry Doctors: Eating Disorder Patients and their Therapists

Abstract

International Review of Psychiatry (1993), 5, 13-18 EDITORIAL Naughty girls and angry doctors: eating disorder patients and their therapists The conceptualization of eating disorders since the last century constitutes only the most recent chapter in the history of self-starvation. It is the era of medicalization of a phenomenon that in the late Middle Ages was seen as a sign of supernatural powers. In those days ‘holy women’ or ‘fasting saints’ claimed divine assistance in existing for years on little or no nourishment. From the nineteenth century on, unusual or prolonged abstinence from food was more and more considered to be a sign of morbidity, especially of a mental disorder. In between, before the shift from ‘miracle’ to ‘illness’, food abstinence became a kind of ‘spectacle’ when the fasting girls appeared on the scene. By claiming to eat very little or even nothing at all, these usually adolescent girls often attracted considerable local and sometimes even national attention. Physicians were asked to settle the question whether it concerned a fraud or a miracle. This stimulated the medical interest in fasting, and the more clinicians studied these ‘miraculous maidens’, the more they discovered simple deception. And if they detected a