Anorexia Nervosa :: essays research papers fc

Could you infer being so afraid of food and the possibility of gaining weight that you would in truth starve yourself? Food and eating are pleasures of everyday life we affect for granted. Having the life of an Anorexic person fills you with the constant fear of one function.becoming fat.Eating disorders such as Anorexia Nervosa are slowly gripping a part of the female adolescent to young adult population. Although, Anorexia Nervosa has only been humankind since the 1970s, records of the disorder go back as far as 1689. doubting Thomas Morton, an English physician, studied subjects with a disorder he called the wasting disease. He had two cases, which were very similar. One was an eight-teen yr. old girl and the other was a six-teen yr. old boy. Both subjects had similar symptoms. They both had a strong privation of appetite, sensitivity to coldness, and extreme sadness. The girl eventually starved herself to death however, the boy did recover (Gordon 12-13).Through out the ce nturies there have been many cases of girls fasting, and not due to religious purposes. In the 1870s the disorder became a topic of more medical concern. It happened around the term two doctors, Sir William scrape and Charles Lasegue, simultaneously published papers on a number of cases relations with self-starvation (Alexander-Mott &Lumsden 101-102). Gull actually came up with the term Anorexia Nervosa, because he believed it was a spooky disease. Both doctors note four distinctive characteristics with each case. All of the affected roles go through high levels of hyperactivity. Each of the patients denied the existence of the disorder. Also, they each had peculiar attitudes toward food. Finally, each patient had pathological family interactions (Gordon 13). Years following Gull and Lasegues discoveries, research continue on this peculiar disorder. Unfortunately for a long period of time Anorexia was confused with Simmonds Disease, an endocrine disorder. So, for awhile Anorex ia sufferers were being prescribed the wrong medications, such as thyroid extracts (Gordon 14). Finally, in the 1930s the two disorders were secernate between.In 1973 a woman who trained in psychoanalysis, named Bruch, wrote a hold up on eating disorders. Bruch had previously worked for three decades with Anorexic and obese patients. She observed that Anorexics had three main characteristics. The first was a distorted body image, a misperception of fat. The second was the inability to identify needs, particularly hunger, but also the hale range of emotions. The last characteristic was a feeling of ineffectiveness, lack of self-worth (Matthews 30).