Down the centuries, self-starvation has taken many morbid guises - in the extremes of religious fasting and the abstinence of saints, in hunger strikes, in the exhibition of living skeletons and hunger artists, and in the fate of melancholics, hysterics, the possessed and bewitched. This history culminates in the 19th century with the labelling of anorexia nervosa, a condition which attracts many theories and explanations and vast literature, in the course of which a medical curiosity has been transformed into a fashionable disease. This account is of both clinical and historical importance and should interest anyone concerned with the interactions of culture and the individual.