March 4: Eating Disorders

Dr. Hilde Bruch, a pediatrician who fled from Nazi Germany in 1933, published the first of several works on obesity and eating disorders in young people, The Importance of Overweight, on this date in 1957. Bruch, who lost to the Nazis two siblings as well as the man she intended to marry, trained as a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins. She became a leading authority on anorexia nervosa (“nervous loss of appetite”), which affects females almost exclusively, and which she identified as a “psycho-social illness” associated with developmental deficits and skewed self-image that are imposed by the culture’s sexist expectations. “You have to convince [sufferers that] they are capable, honest, lovable, warm people. When they feel that good about themselves, treatment is finished. It’s a pretty big job,” said Bruch. Her collected work was published in 1973 under the title Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Person Within. She also wrote The Golden Cage (1979), a book filled with case histories, and Conversations with Anorexics, which was published posthumously in 1988.

“Girls with conforming personalities feel obliged to do something that demands a great degree of independence in order to be respected and recognized. When they get stuck, the only independence they feel they have is to control their bodies.” —Hilde Bruch