1873

First publications identifying anorexia nervosa as a coherent disease entity in London (William Gull) and France (Charles Lasegue’s L’anorexie hystérique). Whereas Gull concentrated on strictly medical aspects of the differential diagnosis, Lasegue understood the condition as a hysteria of the gastric center and was first to describe the family environment in which the condition arose. He described the “manipulative politics of anorexia nervosa” in three stages tied to a broad set of frustrations linked to adolescent girls’ transition to adulthood and their ability to disrupt their families by not eating (Bromberg, 110-125 [Gull]; 126-140 [Lasegue]). For Lasegue, anorexia was a middle-class psychopathology that signified “a striking dysfunction in the bourgeois family system (134). “The efficacy of food refusal as an emotional tactic within the family depended on food’s being plentiful, pleasing, and connected to love. Anorexia nervosa required a certain standard of family provisioning and a regularity of fare for the girl’s rejection of food to have any meaning” (139).