ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3 I examined how ‘anorexia nervosa’ first came to emerge as an object of nineteenth-century medical discourse, exploring how, with the rise of science over theology, women’s self-starvation was gradually taken into the remit of medical rather than ecclesiastical authority (see also Brumberg, 1986). As the medical profession established itself as a source of secular authority, so it also developed an increasing array of knowledges and technologies by which it classified, explained, treated and regulated the population. And, with the concomitant rise of the bourgeois family, sexuality and gender featured as prominent targets of medical discipline (Foucault, 1979) such that ‘woman’, particularly white middle-class woman, was repeatedly constituted as a pathological category (Showalter, 1985). During the nineteenth century, explanations for women’s supposed pathological nature were shifting, however, and ‘anorexia nervosa’ emerged as a distinct disease entity at precisely this juncture in time. The discourse on hysteria was detaching itself from its classical origins so that women’s nerves replaced their wombs in accounts of female pathology. At the same time the equally culturally entrenched discourse on hypochondria was also changing. Whilst retaining its historical reference to the stomach as a nervous organ, hypochondria increasingly referred to general ‘nervousness’ and to ‘malades imaginaires’. And ‘anorexia’, I argued, emerged at the interface of these two converging discourses. It was constituted as a disease entity in which ‘hysteria’ and ‘hypochondria’ became merged and in which pathologized femininity could be rearticulated as nervous rather than classically hysterical.
