'A most peculiar form of disease' : the creation of anorexia nervosa in late nineteenth-century Britain

Anorexia nervosa appeared as a newly named disorder in the 1870s in Britain, leading historians and other scholars to pinpoint this as the origin point of a medicalised understanding of female food refusal. An abiding interest in locating the historical roots of this contemporary disorder has led scholars to emphasise the ways in which anorexia nervosa is therefore an historical and not merely a 'modern' disorder. It has also resulted in a body of scholarship that emphasises continuity over discontinuity in anorexia nervosa's medicalised history. This has meant that scholars have neglected to ask why after its introduction into the medical lexicon, anorexia nervosa failed to become established as a credible, universally recognised and endorsed, and utile diagnostic category. This thesis is therefore concerned with two intertwined curiosities about anorexia nervosa's appearance in this period. It on the one hand explores the conditions within the medical profession that facilitated anorexia nervosa's identification and influenced the form in which it was articulated. It then pivots away from its emergence to show that this new disorder failed to make inroads into either the medical community or into late Victorian society and culture more broadly. The thesis argues that following its identification, anorexia nervosa failed to achieve supremacy within the medical profession and further failed to either reflect or influence women's social reality or align neatly with the anxieties encoded within cultural discourses about young women's health. As a result, and complicating the notion of a binary between continuity or discontinuity, it concludes that although the creation of anorexia nervosa as a new and distinct clinical syndrome in the late nineteenth century does indeed represent the origin point of a medicalised understanding of female food refusal, anorexia nervosa's early history can be most aptly characterised as a 'false start' for what would become, much later, an enduring, troubling and highly visible psychiatric disorder.