Anorexia

As used today, anorexia is an abbreviation of anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder characterized by severe weight loss mainly brought about by restricting one's intake of food to a level much below that required to maintain body weight that is normal for one's height, age, and sex. Formerly, anorexia meant loss of appetite and was defined as such in nineteenth-century medical dictionaries. It was acknowledged as a symptom of a range of physical illnesses, rather than as constituting an illness in its own right. Anorexia was also observed to occur among the mentally ill, and forced feeding of severely underweight patients was practiced in mental asylums. During the later decades of the nineteenth century, an interest in the classification of mental illnesses developed apace with the idea that asylums should have a therapeutic function. By the 1870s, the fasting practices of some young women had been identified in France as constituting a morbid condition termed l'anorexie hysterique, and anorexia nervosa—which became the term of preference—had been introduced to medical circles in Great Britain (Brumberg 1988). Severe fasting practices among young women were thereafter seen as constituting an unusual and morbid illness in its own right. Anorexia and other eating disorders are often taken to be symptomatic of consumer maladies, in this case a consequence of idealized mass media representations and celebrations of “thin bodies” in contemporary consumer culture.

Anorexia nervosa is poorly named, since loss of appetite is not among the symptoms of people now classified as suffering from this disorder. Rather, they generally report feelings of hunger and of the need to control appetite, self-starvation being the practice that distinguishes them. Until the mid-twentieth century, anorexia nervosa was generally thought to be a relatively rare illness, mainly affecting young women from middle- or upper-class families. Research reports largely focused on case presentations, diagnoses, treatments, and discussion of its causes, there being little indication that the incidence of this disorder was rising.