Her explanation is only partly satisfying: the late Middle Ages was a time of civil and economic unrest comparable to our own, and many women retain masochistic proclivities from the earlier period.
Jules R. Bemporad, M.D.provides a more detailed explanation in "The Prehistory of Anorexia Nervosa", an article in the Newsletter of the Psychosomatic Discussion Group of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Bemporad argues that extreme variations in the incidence of anorexia nervosa throughout history are caused by a variety of economic and social factors.
The most important of these, according to Bemporad, is the influence of Eastern religions on Judaism and Christianity through Gnosticism, which espouses a dichotomy between spirit (holy) and flesh (evil, corrupt). Bemporad notes that there were no recorded instances of anorexia in classical Greece, which pre-dated Gnosticism. The first known fatality from anorexia was a member of a group of aristocratic, Roman women who were spiritual followers of St. Jerome. She starved herself to death in 383 A.D. (Ranke-Heinemann, V. Eunuchs For The Kingdom Of Heaven (New York: Penguin Books 1990)).
Another major factor identified by Bemporad is satisfaction of basic physical needs. He notes that during the "Dark Ages" (roughly from the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. to 1200 A.D.), there were only three reported cases of anorexia. With plagues, famines, and military atrocities the order of the day, society venerated female procreative ability and physical stamina. People were too busy trying to survive for eating disorders to assert themselves.
Palazzoli makes the same observation in our own century. There were no recorded cases of anorexia in Italy during World War II because people did not have enough to eat. Only during the post-war period, when the Italian economy had sufficiently recovered from the ravages of the conflict, did the illness reappear. (Selvini-Palozzoli, M. "Anorexia Nervosa: A Syndrome of the Affluent Society", Transcultural Psychiatric Review, 1985, 22:199-205).
Like Egan, Bemporad notes the explosion of anorexia in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when women were often seen as the conduits of divine intervention. He cites Bell's recounting of 261 cases of religiously-based, female starvation between 1206 and 1934. More than two-thirds of them occurred between 1200 and 1600.
During the Reformation, according to Bemporad, the Church proclaimed that people could communicate with Christ only through a male priest. The decline of female spiritual influence was accompanied by a precipitous drop in anorexia.
 |
 |
Go To Page: 1 2
