From fasting saints to anorexic girls : the history of self-starvation / Walter Vandereycken & Ron van Deth.
"With waiflike models dominating the advertising world and a new wave of feminists waging war on social pressure to be thin, eating disorders have, it seems, attained the status of a modern crisis. Although anorexia nervosa was not identified as such until the nineteenth century, the compulsion...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English German Dutch |
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Washington Square, N.Y. :
New York University Press,
1994.
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Table of Contents:
- A mirror of time and culture. A current view of anorexia nervosa ; Anorexia nervosa as a culture-bound syndrome ; Psychological history and historical psychology ; The invention of syndromes
- Holy fasts. Supernatural power ; Penance and asceticism ; Church's rules on fasting ; The asceticism of the desert fathers ; Late mediaeval ascetics and mystics ; Modern fasting saints
- Possession and witchcraft. Fasting and temptation by the devil ; Worn out and bewitched ; Exorcism as treatment ; From possession to patienthood ; Anorexia nervosa and exorcism
- Miraculous maidens. Self-starvation as a spectacle ; The miracle put to the test ; Margaretha Weiss: the miraculous maiden from Roed ; The alleged fasting of Barbara Kremers from Unna ; Elva Vliegen: the mendacious maiden from Meurs ; From miraculous maiden to hysterical patient
- Hunger artists and living skeletons. Thinness as entertainment ; Fasting for a living ; Heyday and decline of the art of fasting ; The art of fasting in literature
- Food abstinence: medical mystery and therapy. A miracle of God ; Miracle or natural phenomena? ; Living on air ; The beneficial effect of food abstinence
- Food abstinence and emaciation as signs of illness. Anorexia ; Atrophia nervosa or nervous consumption ; Hysteria ; Melancholia ; Love-sickness and chlorosis
- Who was the first to describe anorexia nervosa? Precursors of a 'new' illness ; Gull and Lasègue
- Self-starvation in the hands of the physicians. Characteristics of the 'new' illness ; Nervosa or hysterica? ; Psychasthenia and neurasthenia ; Ebb and flood of theories
- The Victorian roots of anorexia nervosa. The powerlessness of the 'ideal' family ; The growing-pains of puberty and adolescence ; The affliction of the 'new woman' ; Discovery of the forbidden sexuality ; Beauty as a 'weighty' task
- Morbid miracle or miraculous morbidity? Saints or patients? ; Anorexic artists ; The mysterious epidemic.