The psychoneuroses and their treatmet by psychotherapy / by J. Dejerine and E. Gauckler ; authorized translation by Smith Ely Jelliffe.

  • Déjerine, J. (Joseph Jules), 1849-1917.
Date:
[1915]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The psychoneuroses and their treatmet by psychotherapy / by J. Dejerine and E. Gauckler ; authorized translation by Smith Ely Jelliffe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    or make a great scene whenever anyone tries to make them eat. There are some who subsist on a quarter of an apple. For others two or three prunes form their daily rations. A certain one took two or three eggs a day. We saw another who had gotten to the point where she could live if she had a bowl of sugar water beside her. She dipped a paint brush into it from time to time, and moistened her lps with it. This was her only nourishment. There are, unfortunately, only too many examples of cases where these conditions have been brought about by dietary regulations pre- scribed by some ill-advised physician. These patients, in fact, will often say to you, ‘‘ It is no wonder that I eat so little, for they have steadily cut down the quantity of my food on the one hand, and on the other hand, they have put me on a diet from which they have cut out everything I Like to eat.”’ A young girl, eighteen years of age, who had undergone much grief and emotion and anxiety, lost her appetite. A physician was consulted, and she was put upon a diet, thanks to which, at the end of six months, she weighed only sixty-one and a half pounds. A child of fourteen who had lost her father a year before, and whose mother was left a widow with four children, was much affected by the poverty in which they found themselves. She developed some digestive troubles of whose origin the physician was ignorant. He reduced her diet to soups and milk foods, with the result that the child faded away before one’s very eyes, until she weighed only fifty pounds. At other times mental anorexia is established without any previous emotional disturbance, but simply by ill-advised medical treatment. A young girl of nineteen was sent to us from the provinces, on account of her excessive loss of weight. She weighed only sixty-two and a half pounds, and ate nothing but a little fruit and an egg each day. Until six months before she had been hearty and well, but having a sore throat she was put upon a liquid diet that was far from sufficient. Her appetite gradually disappeared, and in three months she had lost forty-four pounds. The lack of recognition of mental anorexia is all the more serious because patients who are afflicted by it may die of inanition. The pulse then becomes very rapid and respiration difficult, fetid odors come from the mouth, and some patients slip away who could certainly have been saved by better treatment. One of us has seen several such cases of death, in his private practice, as well as in the hospital. One of these patients, whom he saw forty- eight hours before she died, had come from a sanitarium, where she had been put upon a restricted diet. Secondary mental anorexia occurs at all ages of life; but primary mental anorexia is more apt to be found in young girls from fifteen
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