The conventional understanding of eating disorders is as a by-product of the modern world’s unrealistic beauty standards, as promoted by photoshopped magazine shots and rail-thin catwalk models. But what if the true cause is wired into us at the level of our very moral foundations? This is the premise of Unholy Anorexia, a piece that explores parallels between mortification of the flesh in medieval saints, and the suffering of modern-day anorexics.

The author, neuropsychologist and writer Paul Broks, relates how a chance encounter with an anorexic woman attending one of his lectures prompted him to re-evaluate anorexia. Where formerly he’d seen anorexics as merely ‘precious young women just refusing to eat’, now anorexia seemed to encapsulate ‘questions that had always interested me, questions that, inevitably, loop back to Descartes: the relation of mind and body; selfhood; mortality; divinity.’

Broks recounts how this line of enquiry developed via reading a book on medieval mystics whose asceticism demonstrated clear parallels with anorexia. For example Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth-century mystic, ‘was dead of self-starvation at 33’. While such ‘holy anorexics’ as Catherine of Siena framed their self-mortification in terms of religious faith rather than ideal body image, Broks suggests that the disgust expressed by both medieval and modern anorexics for their bodies offers some clues as to how we could rethink the treatment of anorexia today:

The author sketches a brief history of the psychology of disgust, from its most primal function as guardian of the body against noxious or poisonous substances to moralisation through metaphors of cleanliness and sanctity. From there he shows how disgust can to turn against the very bodies it evolved to protect, in a doomed effort to deny the inevitability of death:

The author traces the tension between divine and the disgusting in lives of history’s holy anorexics: Catherine of Siena is reported to have cured herself of disgust at one woman’s sickness by drinking the pus from her sores. Disgust, he suggests, is under-researched as a factor in modern anorexia nervosa but indicative results suggest heightened disgust-sensitivity in sufferers.

Having survived a bout of anorexia as a young adult, this rings true to my experience: though thankfully those days are long behind me, I can still recall the overwhelming feeling of disgust triggered by the prospect of even the most frugal meal.