Prodigious Abstinence and Nervous Consumption: Tracing Medical Discourses of Female (In)Digestion, 1651-1694

The question of female self-starvation has been widely debated in the history of medicine and religion, with scholars such as Silverman (1983) anachronistically diagnosing “miraculous maids”—women who claimed to have miraculously survived without food for extended periods of time—as early cases of anorexia nervosa. Departing from the attempt to formulate a long history of anorexia nervosa, this paper addresses the issue of female self-starvation in the context of the cultural fascination with nutrition and digestion in religious and medical-scientific discourses of post-Civil War England, particularly attending to emerging theories of nutrition and digestion, such as Thomas Willis’ theory of fermentation. Specifically, this paper closely examines three cases of female abstinence and indigestion: the case of Martha Taylor as described in Thomas Hobbes’ letters, John Reynolds’ "Discourse on Prodigious Abstinence," and the several religious pamphlets that advertise her abstinence as a miracle; the two cases of “nervous Consumption” described by physician Richard Morton, and the case of Eve in John Milton’s "Paradise Lost," whose inability to abstain from eating the forbidden fruit caused, I argue, the first case of indigestion in Eden. Arguing that popular and medical-scientific discourse surrounding the prodigious abstinence of miraculous maids should be understood in a larger cultural pre-occupation with food, nutrition, and digestion—and in particular in the medical-scientific demystification of the female relation to food and digestion—this paper offers a closer examination of narratives of female abstinence and indigestion in seventeenth century England.