Fasting Girls: Their Physiology and Pathology

In Fasting Girls: Their Physiology and Pathology, William A. Hammond examines young women who claimed, or were believed, to live without food, placing such cases at the intersection of neurology, psychiatry, religious history, and nineteenth-century medical skepticism. He considers bodily symptoms, reported abstinence, fraud, suggestion, and the social conditions that enabled extraordinary narratives to circulate. Written in the clinical, classificatory style characteristic of Victorian medical monographs, the book seeks to distinguish genuine physiological phenomena from hysteria, deception, and misinterpretation. Its literary and intellectual context is the period's growing effort to explain "miraculous" fasting through empirical investigation while still relying on gendered assumptions about nervous illness and female behavior. Hammond (1828–1900), an influential American neurologist and former Surgeon General of the United States, was a prominent advocate of scientific approaches to mental and nervous disorders. His experience with military medicine, clinical observation, and debates surrounding insanity and hysteria informed his interest in cases that challenged conventional ideas about nutrition and bodily regulation. The work reflects both his commitment to physiological explanation and the limitations of nineteenth-century diagnostic categories. This book will reward readers interested in the history of medicine, anorexia, Victorian culture, religious phenomena, and the emergence of modern psychiatry. It is especially valuable as a document of how physicians transformed extraordinary female bodies into objects of scientific authority, even as the cases resisted easy explanation.