During the two most severe depressive episodes I've experienced, when I lost weight in the rapid and involuntary manner characteristic of this kind of emotional disorder, I found myself the object, for a surprising number of women, less of sympathy than of envy: "Oh," they'd sigh, "aren't you lucky to be so thin." Since, at these points, my health and even my survival were in some jeopardy, such a response could only reflect not an accurate assessment of my physique but a macabre but pervasive social attitude: Staying \o7 well \f7 has become, for most modern women, less important than staying \o7 thin. \f7 This and related attitudes toward food, appetite, and the female body create the environment within which eating disorders, among them anorexia nervosa, are flourishing in the United States and other postindustrial societies.

In "Fasting Girls," Joan Jacobs Brumberg, who is director of women's studies and associate professor in the department of Human Development and Family Studies at Cornell University, examines the practice and significance of food refusal from the Middle Ages to the present. As suggested by the fact that the book originally was published by Harvard University Press, and also by the 75 densely printed pages of notes, this is not a self-help or pop-psych book for the casual reader. A social historian of some sophistication, Brumberg draws not only on historical documents and medical archives but also on studies in psychoanalysis, semiotics and feminist theory in tracing and analyzing the shifts in attitudes toward and interpretations of the process she believes best described as "addiction to starvation."

The usefulness of the "dependency-addiction model," according to Brumberg, is that it permits anorexia nervosa to be divided into two stages: "sociocultural context, or 'recruitment' to fasting behavior," and "the subsequent 'career' as an anorexic," which "includes physiological and psychological changes that condition the individual to exist in a starvation state."

The first stage falls within the purview of the historian, and thus of "Fasting Girls." In terms of "recruitment"--that is, the motivation for refusing food--the anorexia mirabilis (miraculously inspired loss of appetite) of the female saints of medieval Europe who claimed to subsist solely on the Eucharist differed from later forms of abstinence, although all have shared "the use of food as a symbolic language" to articulate ideals and conflicts inexpressible in words. "From a historical perspective," Brumberg states, "certain social and cultural systems, at different points in time, encourage or promote control of appetite in women, but for different reasons and purposes."