Interestingly enough the original use of anorexia in English wаs in a religious context. Firstly, by the poet and translator Joshua Sylvester. In 1605, he published Divine Works a translation of a poem by the French poet Du Barbas about the creation. This work later impacted John Milton in his writing of his masterpiece Paradise Lost. In a description of afflictions affecting the natural powers of the body, he refers to the stomach and describes bulimia, slowness of digestion and anorexia. Some 50 years later, the two words appear again together with definitions, anorexia as “neither appetite nor digestion” and bulimia as “appetite but no digestion” in a very serious book called Saints Everlasting Rest by the Puritan minister, Richard Baxter. There he claims both diseases were nothing except excuses not to meditate.
The word аnorexia was taken from the Greek an (no) and orexia (appetite). The symptoms of people fasting, especially women, were known in medieval times. Mary Queen of Scots probably had anorexia when she was a teenager. She seems to be a medical wonder, also surviving both measles and smallpox.
But the disease was really put on the medical map around about 1870 as a result of the analysis by Sir William Gull, who defined anorexia nervosa, noting that those suffering were “mostly of the female sex, and chiefly between the ages of sixteen and twenty three”.
