[The art of going hungry. Anorexia in medical texts in the late 19th century].
The essay analyzes representations of anorexia in French, English and German medical literature from 1870 to 1900, paying specific attention to rhetorical patterns. Unlike other nervous diseases, anorexia was considered a somatic illness. Rather than subjects, patients were regarded simply as skeletal bodies. Most medical case histories enact the transformation of an emaciated body into a nubile woman-slender, perhaps, but ready for marriage. The patients are described as studious girls who 'devour' literature instead of food. This metaphor is taken from etiology to therapy, when the so-called "Mastkur" in the sanatorium replaces 'enormous' amounts of literature with 'enormous' amounts of food to be eaten.
Diezemann
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D000855:Anorexia / Q000266:history*; D005060:Europe; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006815:Hunger; D013782:Textbooks as Topic / Q000266:history*