, had their times
of fasting, and some of these were quite prolonged.

At the present day religious fervor accounts for but few of our
remarkable instances of abstinence, most of them being due to some form
of nervous disorder, varying from hysteria and melancholia to absolute
insanity. The ability seen in the Middle Ages to live on the Holy
Sacrament and to resist starvation may possibly have its analogy in
some of the fasting girls of the present day. In the older times these
persons were said to have been nourished by angels or devils; but
according to Hammond many cases both of diabolical abstinence from food
and of holy fasting exhibited manifest signs of hysteric symptoms.
Hammond, in his exhaustive treatise on the subject of "Fasting Girls,"
also remarks that some of the chronicles detail the exact symptoms of
hysteria and without hesitation ascribe them to a devilish agency. For
instance, he speaks of a young girl in the valley of Calepino who had
all her limbs twisted and contracted and had a sensation in her
esophagus as if a ball was sometimes rising in her throat or falling
into the stomach--a rather lay description of the characteristic
hysteric "lump in the throat," a frequent sign of nervous abstinence.

Abstinence, or rather anorexia, is naturally associated with numerous
diseases, particularly of the febrile type; but in all of these the
patient is maintained by the use of nutrient enemata or by other means,
and the abstinence is never complete.

A peculiar type of anorexia is that striking and remarkable digestive
disturbance of hysteria which Sir William Gull has called anorexia
nervosa. In this malady there is such annihilation of the appetite that
in some cases it seems impossible ever to eat again. Out of it grows an
antagonism to food which results at last, and in its worst forms, in
spasm on the approach of food, and this in its turn gives rise to some
of those remarkable cases of survival for long periods without food.
As this goes on there may be an extreme degree of muscular
restlessness, so that the patients wander about until exhausted.
According to Osler, who reports a fatal case in a girl who, at her
death, only weighed 49 pounds, nothing more pitiable is to be seen in
medical practice than an advanced case of this malady. The emaciation
and exhaustion are extreme, and the patient is as miserable as one with
carcinoma of the esophagus, food either not being taken at all or only
upon ur