Eating disorders

Anorexia nervosa was the first eating disorder to be recognised. Conditions resembling anorexia nervosa can be found among accounts of fasting female saints during the medieval period (Bell, 1985). However, definitive clinical descriptions of the disorder did not appear until the 1870s, when the British physician William Gull (1874) and the French neuropsychiatrist Henry Lasègue (1873) provided detailed accounts of a condition whose essential features have remained unchanged to this day. Gull proposed the term anorexia nervosa, which refers to a loss of appetite (anorexia) as a result of a nervous (nervosa) or mental rather than a biological cause.