Tuesday, July 3, 2018

The history of the term Anorexia Nervosa.

The earliest medical descriptions of anorexic illnesses are generally credited to English physician Richard Morton, in 1689. However it was not until 1868, Sir William Gull, one of Queen Victoria’s personal physicians, published a seminal paper which established the term anorexia nervosa and provided a number of detailed case descriptions and treatments. The 1868 paper was titled Anorexia nervosa (apepsia hysterica, anorexia hysterica) and the reference is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9385628. The term anorexia is of Greek origin: an- (ἀν-, prefix denoting negation or without) and orexis (ὄρεξις, "appetite"), thus translating to "nervous absence of appetite". Read more here: https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/82033.

No comments:

Post a Comment