From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: History of Self-starvation

Down the centuries self-starvation has taken many morbid guises - in the extremes of religious fasting and the abstinence of the saints; in hunger strikes; in the exhibition of living skeletons and hunger-artists; in the fate of melancholics, hysterics, the possessed and bewitched. This story culminates in the 19th century labelling of anorexia nervosa, a condition which has since attracted a host of theories and explanations in the course of which a medical curiosity has been transformed into a modern disease.