Anorexia Nervosa :: essays research papers fc

Could you imagine being so afraid of food and the possibility of gaining weight that you would actually starve yourself? Food and eating are pleasures of workaday life we take for granted. Having the life of an Anorexic person fills you with the constant fear of one thing.becoming fat.Eating disorders such as Anorexia Nervosa are slowly prehend a part of the female adolescent to young adult population. Although, Anorexia Nervosa has only been public 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 lack of appetite, sensitivity to coldness, and extreme sadness. The girl eventually starved herself to death however, the boy did recover (Gordon 12-13). by means of out the centuries th ere have been many cases of girls fasting, and not due to religious purposes. In the 1870s the disorder became a topic of more medical exam concern. It happened around the time two doctors, Sir William Gull and Charles Lasegue, simultaneously published papers on a number of cases dealing with self-starvation (Alexander-Mott &Lumsden 101-102). Gull actually came up with the margin Anorexia Nervosa, because he believed it was a nervous disease. Both doctors note four distinctive characteristics with each case. All of the patients experienced high levels of hyperactivity. Each of the patients denied the existence of the disorder. Also, they each had singular attitudes toward food. Finally, each patient had pathological family interactions (Gordon 13). Years following Gull and Lasegues discoveries, research continued on this peculiar disorder. Unfortunately for a long check of time Anorexia was confused with Simmonds Disease, an endocrine disorder. So, for awhile Anorexia sufferers were being prescribed the wrong medications, such as thyroid extracts (Gordon 14). Finally, in the 1930s the two disorders were howling(a) between.In 1973 a woman who trained in psychoanalysis, named Bruch, wrote a book on eating disorders. Bruch had previously worked for trio 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 whole range of emotions. The pass away characteristic was a feeling of ineffectiveness, lack of self-worth (Matthews 30).