The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery - Hardcover

Stacey, Michelle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585421359 ISBN 13: 9781585421350

Publisher: Tarcher, 2002

Synopsis

The riveting true account of Mollie Fancher, who, in 1865, was plagued with a vast array of ailments including paralysis and trances, all of which caused her to "live on air" for the rest of her life, examines such intriguing phemonena as fasting saints and the dawn of the Age of Neurosis, detailing the social and technoligical turmoil of the time. 20,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Michelle Stacey, the author of Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate, and Fear Food, is a journalist who writes extensively for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Allure.

From The New England Journal of Medicine:

In 1865, an 18-year-old woman named Mollie Fancher began her career as "the Brooklyn Enigma." For more than a decade after a horsecar accident, Fancher exhibited symptoms that included blindness, trance, memory loss, paralysis, seizures, and clairvoyance -- what modern psychiatry would call dissociative disorder -- and claimed to survive without food. At the same time, like any other Victorian gentlewoman, Fancher wrote thousands of letters, produced countless pieces of embroidery and wax flowers, and spent much of her time in social conversation. Fancher not only became the darling of the 19th-century New York press, reaching a peak of fame in the late 1870s, but also energized debates about how long humans could survive without nourishment. More substantially, she catalyzed public discussions about how we should interpret symptoms like hers. Were they signs of a physical illness precipitated by organic lesions, or did they indicate a disorder of the emotions, spirit, or moral sensibilities? Who was qualified to treat her -- a physician or a spiritualist? In 1860s New York, the distinction between physical and mental illness was cloudy, and cases like Fancher's acted as catalysts for arguments about defining, diagnosing, and treating illness. Michelle Stacey's book offers us the Fancher case with an emphasis on these debates and their connections to our own time, when illness is being reexamined for its anchors in the body and mind and many are reconsidering the troubled dichotomy on which diagnosis often rests. Stacey's account of the disputes about Fancher's condition, especially the veracity of her claim to survive without food, centers on two doctors who sought to expose her as a fraud and to explain her behavior. George Miller Beard wrote American Nervousness (1881), a key work about neurasthenia, as well as books on sleep problems and other "nervous" disorders; William Alexander Hammond, author of Fasting Girls: Their Physiology and Pathology (1879), was a prolific American physician-writer on the topic of anorexia and other conditions that were considered to be subtypes of hysteria (itself a subtype of neurasthenia). Stacey makes the two doctors' efforts to unmask Fancher or to diagnose her condition incredibly suspenseful, given that any 21st-century reader knows definitively from the start that she could not have lived on air. The suspense derives partly from Stacey's lively characterizations of the doctors and the patient they never treated, but it is also in part the result of Stacey's use of the case to figure larger debates about medical professionalism during an era in which university-trained physicians in the United States and abroad sought vigorously to distinguish themselves from quacks and other less-educated healers. Partly because of their engagement in these larger conflicts, Beard and Hammond wanted to assess Mollie Fancher either as a patient whose case was explicable by modern scientific medicine or else as a delusional or mendacious person. Their interest in Fancher's case also reflected their participation in the transition in American medicine from thinking about nervous disorders as conditions of the body to classifying them as conditions of the mind and emotions. The public argument about the mysteries and possible deceptions produced by a young woman highlights the development of modern psychiatry and the post-Darwinian craze for spiritualism at the end of the 19th century, all of which Stacey offers as relevant contexts for Fancher's case. Furthermore, as Stacey argues with support from scholars like Joan Jacobs Brumberg and Rudolph Bell, Fancher's situation is particularly inflected by issues of sex roles. This "fasting girl" gestures both to 19th-century debates about anorexia and to several studies in the past 20-odd years that have made connections between the pervasive eating disorders of our own time and those of earlier generations. Exploring the "holy anorexia" or "anorexia mirabilis" of medieval saints and the "fashionable women's diseases" of the 19th and 20th or 21st centuries, scholars of anorexia have suggested that the refusal of food has worked throughout history as a possible way for young women to opt out of expected and damaging social roles and to exert control over their lives. Stacey discovered Fancher in Brumberg's discussion of anorexia and continues to position her in relation to these scholarly debates. As should be evident by now, this is an extremely ambitious book whose weaknesses come from overreaching. On the cusp between the popular and the scholarly, Stacey's study draws so heavily on more clearly academic works that she might have simply directed us in a footnote to Brumberg or to other authors who discuss the cultural history of anorexia, such as Caroline Walker Bynum or Susan Bordo. By taking on so many contexts in which to read Fancher, including anorexia and religion, the physiology of starvation, the changing face of Victorian medicine, and the rise and fall of spiritualism, Stacey leads us on a wild ride through history; as a result, she cannot develop any of these themes all that well. Nor can she work out the important ways in which each way of framing Fancher resonates with the others. Sex roles, for example, are a central feature of the discussion of anorexia but disappear by the book's intelligent conclusion about the debates over professionalism in the 19th century and our own. They may, however, be even more relevant to the latter discussion. Thus, although Stacey gestures intelligently toward connections other scholars have spent decades developing and brings their ideas to the attention of general readers, she understandably has difficulty synthesizing all the issues she has raised by the end of the book. In fact, The Fasting Girl does not need to gesture as broadly as it does. Stacey not only gives us clear and lively prose telling a rich and fascinating story of illness and healing in American culture, but also invites us to think about the cultural history of the press and its active role in medical debates -- a role that physicians like Beard used to their advantage. The Fancher case, with its local and journalistic history, is riveting in its own right and would have been a more reasonable focus for this memorable book. Martha Stoddard Holmes, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2003 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tarcher
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1585421359
• ISBN 13: 9781585421350
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256